{"id":193576,"date":"2018-12-30T10:23:56","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T16:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=193576"},"modified":"2018-12-29T19:17:13","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T01:17:13","slug":"drug-use-pregnancy-child-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/drug-use-pregnancy-child-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"Drug use during pregnancy not child abuse, says Pennsylvania Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Friday that the use of illegal drugs during pregnancy is not child abuse. The mothers, the court said, cannot be considered abusive towards their newly born children under the state’s child protection law because the law’s definition of a child doesn’t include fetuses.<\/p>\n

Justice Christine Donahue wrote<\/a> in the majority opinion, “We concluded, based on the relevant statutory language, that a mother cannot be found to be a perpetrator of child abuse against her newly born child for drug use while pregnant.”<\/p>\n

She went on to explain that this is because “a person cannot have committed child abuse unless he or she was a perpetrator, and a person cannot be a perpetrator unless there is a ‘child’ at the time of the act.”<\/p>\n

Simply put, they claim a fetus is not legally a\u00a0child, so any harm done to the fetus in utero by their mother’s drug use cannot be labeled as child abuse.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Pro-abortion counselor sees link between abortion and substance abuse<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n