HARRISBURG — Last week, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a bill amending the Child Protective Services Law to increase monitoring of and care for drug-addicted mothers and their exposed newborns.

The new bill precedes arguments in a landmark case headed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in September on whether prenatal drug abuse is child abuse. That case centers on a Jersey Shore woman who gave birth to a baby girl who went through withdrawal for 19 days after she was born in UPMC Susquehanna Williamsport last January.

Clinton County Children and Youth Services took the case to county trial court, accusing the mother of child abuse under the CPSL, saying her actions in taking drugs while pregnant caused her infant daughter to suffer “bodily harm.”

The mother lost custody of the child, who was placed in foster care immediately after she was discharged from the hospital.

But in May 2017, President Judge Craig Miller ruled that the mother’s actions while pregnant were not child abuse, citing the fact that a child’s relationship to its mother is not established until the child is born, rendering actions the mother takes during pregnancy incapable of being child abuse.

CYS filed a petition in the Superior Court in December to reverse the trial court decision. And the Court’s three-judge panel reversed it, remanding the case to the state Supreme Court. Justice Geoffrey H. Moulton wrote the majority opinion, saying the mother’s actions in taking drugs while pregnant could be child abuse if she “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly caused, or created a reasonable likelihood of, bodily injury to a child after birth.”

In 2016, Pennsylvania’s 67 counties reported 3,897 live births where the infant was exposed to illegal drugs before birth.

In the four-county area that includes UPMC Lock Haven, UPMC Williamsport, Mount Nittany Medical Center and Geisinger Medical Center (Danville), there were 52 babies born that were exposed to illegal drugs before birth in 2016. So, out of 4,426 total births in the area, 1.2 percent were born affected by their mother’s prenatal substance use.

Pennsylvania’s new CPSL amendment changes protocols for “mandated reporting,” a section that compels health care workers to report newborns suffering withdrawal or Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder as a result of a mother’s drug or alcohol use to the local CYS agency.

It affirms the current practice of not categorizing a report of a substance-exposed infant as a child abuse report.

And with the new bill, health care workers will no longer report their observations to CYS but to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. They now must notify DHS regarding infants affected by substance use, withdrawal or FASD, but the language of the bill removes the mother’s role and includes drugs that were prescribed to the mother by a health care professional to treat substance abuse, like methadone.

The amendment also says the DHS must work with the state Departments of Health and Drug and Alcohol Programs to decide how health care providers should best notify DHS and if there are situations where child welfare services won’t get involved, implement infant and family screening tools, figure out what data to collect and identify which agency should pursue a plan for safe care.

Under the new legislation, local CYS agencies will no longer be the ones responding to initial reports of infants affected by drug and alcohol use. This amendment could affect the power local governments have when it comes to protecting children and their families, because it turns all the responsibility of contacting the infant’s parents and performing risk or safety assessments over to the state.

State Sen. Judy Schwank (D-Berks) took a stance on the question posed in the pending Supreme Court case on whether prenatal drug abuse is child abuse.

“This bill continues to promote a public health approach and to once again stipulate that in Pennsylvania lawmakers have not and will not hopefully equate the co-occurrence of drug use and pregnancy as child abuse,” she said. “This legislation reinforces that Pennsylvania is committed to a public health approach to address the health, safety and early childhood development needs of these infants and their families.”