18-year-old Syeisha Johnson was charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury after allegedly taking the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol to end a pregnancy at 31 weeks in July. Her boyfriend was also arrested and charged with negligent child abuse.
Johnson found out she was pregnant at 20 weeks in June, and then ordered the abortion pills online to be shipped from Virginia. According to the police report: “On July 29, 2026 Ms. Johnson began having abdominal pain and sat down during the day to help with the pain. She sat on the toilet and gave birth to a child.”
Johnson turned 18 in June, meaning she was past the North Carolina requirement for minors to get parental permission for an abortion, however the state bans most abortions after 12 weeks.
Her story comes the same week a recording was released of a call between acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and faith leaders, where Blanche promised that the Trump administration would work to ban mail-order abortion pills nationwide.
Without robust sex education, it’s very likely that this girl didn’t know how mifepristone works, only that it is an abortion pill. Teenagers don’t tend to make great decisions under pressure. She couldn’t legally get the pills at all until she turned 18 years old.
She would have been able to have a safe abortion if it had been legally available.
This is entirely on the state in my opinion. Completely and entirely the government’s fault here.
It sounds like you and I agree on the problem but you are intentionally failing to acknowledge my point about her “solution” being wrong. Which makes this a bad faith conversation not worth continuing.
What would a correct solution have looked like, in your opinion?
My opinion is: this should have been a decision involving a doctor, but the state made that impossible. Whether she made a bad decision or not, the state failed first, and I, personally, hold the failure of the state to a higher level of scrutiny than the failure of a pregnant teenager.
We all agree what got here there. No need to repeat that.
The correct solution would have been pretty much anything that didn’t involve taking a drug that wasn’t unsafe for how far along she was. No medical professional would have advised using that method at 31 weeks because they would have lost their license.
I disagree. I think it’s worth repeating that the STATE failed. I think it’s worth repeating that I hold the STATE to a higher degree of scrutiny than I hold a desperate teenager. The reason I think this should be repeated is that some people only understand policy in terms of rational people making rational decisions, when that describes absolutely no one who has ever lived.
The policy is bad, in part, because it will cause people to make mistakes.
I don’t need every solution to be listed. I just want one specific solution that you think is the/a correct solution.
Yes. The state failed. In the rush for control of women’s bodies they decided that human sacrifice with the goal of keeping women down was the right choice. Hopefully the backfire will come swiftly and this will all be reversed state by state and at the federal level with an actual amendment protecting women from this ever again.
That doesn’t change that what she did could have killed her. As I said elsewhere here I’m not qualified nor in her shoes to know what she should or could have done. But there is a very real chance she could have killed herself doing this. It’s okay to say you don’t know the answer but one is obviously not the right one. Not everything can be known. And while I wouldn’t presume to tell her what she should or could have done I would be very sure to have told her that she was risking her life by doing this. But if I were that involved I would have taken donations for gas money and gotten them out of state to someplace that could help.
To be clear, I’m not asking you to provide a “correct” solution because I don’t know. YOU said someone was “intentionally failing to acknowledge [your] point about her “solution” being wrong.”
You don’t actually have a solution, and for you to pile blame onto someone who is already subjugated by a cruel government is just doubling the cruelty.
That’s easy to say when we’re talking about one specific person in one specific high profile case. How many times do you think this kind of thing has happened since 2022?
How about this… instead of patting yourself on the back for “would’ve done the right thing,” when you already did nothing… you just… keep doing and saying nothing? Because you want these restrictive laws to be changed, right? You want this problem to have never been an option because she was able to just go to a doctor first, right?
Saying and doing nothing is more helpful for making that change, than you entering this conversation by blaming the victim of bad policy.
I didn’t say I knew the right thing. I said they put their own life in danger by using a medication that wasn’t meant to handle a 31 week pregnancy.
Some women would rather die than give birth to be perfectly honest.
So the correct solution was putting her own life in danger to save the fetus?
If you think I said anything remotely related to her not having an abortion then you used reading comprehension as a dump stat.
What is that solution then?
We both know what it is you’re implying.
We both don’t know that. You have guessed it incorrectly. I stated up front that I’m all about abortions being totally legal.
Would you advise someone you knew to take an abortion pill when they were twice into the period it covers? That’s a recipe for disaster and by that I mean the mom dying.
I’m about the mom surviving. Not the kid.
Say it with your chest instead of trying to dodge it.
You would have preferred she give birth, right?
Yes, teenagers have poor decision making skills. I am not intentionally failing to acknowledge your point. I think your point doesn’t matter in this case and I’ve spoken on that point a few times now.
She would have been able to have an abortion at a much safer time for both her and the fetus if it was accessible.
That would have been nice. But, as you know, not legally possible.
Anyway, you are focused on what started this. We agree. It is unfortunate we couldn’t move past that.
It used to be legally possible until Roe v Wade was overturned.
See, a total failure to communicate. We agree on the problem, the state is passing laws to kill women because they are incapable of anything else. It is so boring when people get stuck on a loop and can’t deviate from their programming to have an actual conversation and treat someone trying to have a different conversation as though they disagree with them. The narcissism of small difference is on full display here. Two people that agree can’t talk because one of them has failed to understand that they agree.
You still want to blame this teenager who had no other options.
You can’t handle being in the wrong in this comment section and are handling it poorly.
I want the teen to live. And taking an abortion pill more than double into the term is not congruent with that.
Giving birth would have also been a great risk to her life.