Prenatal Child Abuse Issue Back Before Kentucky Supreme Court

A case in which a Kentucky woman was convicted of child-abuse charges for using cocaine while pregnant is being reviewed by the state Supreme Court for a second time, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported Dec. 9.

Prosecutors charged Ina Cochran with “wantonly engaging in conduct that created a risk of death or serious physical injury to another person” in 2005 for allegedly using cocaine days before her daughter was born; Cochran and the newborn both tested positive for the drug in a hospital.

A county court dismissed the case, pointed to a state Supreme Court ruling in 1993 that said that a fetus is not a person under the law and that child-abuse charges don’t apply to women alleged to have harmed their unborn children.

However, the state Court of Appeals reinstated the charges against Cochran, and the Kentucky Supreme Court is again considering the issue.

The state attorney general’s office says that “it would be absurd to recognize the viable fetus as a person for purpose of homicide laws but not for the purposes of statutes proscribing child abuse.” But referring to state laws intended to protect women seeking abortions, Cochran’s lawyers replied, “It betrays logic to suggest, as the commonwealth does, that the legislature intended to punish a woman for endangering her unborn child but not for actually killing it.”

Others said that prosecuting women like Cochran would discourage them from going to hospitals to give birth and that state law requires that addiction should be treated as a public-health issue rather than with punishment.