The fake mom charged with snatching a newborn from a Manhattan hospital 23 years ago simply raised the girl after someone else kidnapped her, her lawyer said yesterday.

“We don’t deny she raised her,” Ann Pettway’s public defender, Robert Baum, said in Manhattan federal court. “The question is whether she was kidnapping her or the baby was given to her.”

Baum said he was trying to find a woman seen by five witnesses wandering around Harlem Hospital in a nurse’s uniform at about the time of Carlina White’s abduction in 1987.

He said that police, thinking they knew exactly when Carlina vanished, accepted the woman’s alibi but that the presumed timeline might not have been accurate.

Baum’s comments came after a brief but dramatic court hearing in which Pettway, 49, found herself face to face with real mom Joy White for the first time since the Jan. 23 arrest.

After hearing the not-guilty plea, a sobbing White ducked into a bathroom to compose herself.