Posted without comment (reg req’d) :

SUFFOLK — A judge dismissed on Monday charges against a 22-year-old pregnant Suffolk woman who shot herself in the stomach to abort her unborn child.
If the case had gone forward, it would have been the first time that a woman would have been tried in Virginia for aborting her own baby.
Tammy Skinner – scheduled to give birth to her third daughter on the day of the shooting – called 911 early Feb. 23 from a downtown parking lot and told the dispatcher that someone shot her.
Police later charged her with illegally inducing her own abortion, filing a false police report and using a firearm in the commission of a felony. On Monday, Judge James D. Moore sentenced Skinner to 30 days in jail for filing a false police report then suspended all her jail time. Prosecutors asked Moore to drop the firearms charge because it doesn’t apply to inducing an abortion.
On July 10, Moore will decide whether Skinner has to pay between $750 and $1,500 for the cost of the investigation.
Skinner, unemployed and living on welfare, initially told police she couldn’t remember the last name of the man who picked her up, shot her and then pushed her out of a car Feb. 23. Later, she told police that the unborn child’s father shot her. Skinner is the mother of two girls, 1 and 4.