Definition
Prolicide is a term from medical jurisprudence referring to the destruction of human offspring, encompassing both the killing of a fetus in the womb and the killing of a newborn infant after birth. Because it spans both prenatal and postnatal acts, prolicide functions as an umbrella concept rather than a discrete criminal charge. Legal writers have historically divided the subject into two subcategories: feticide (destruction of the fetus in utero) and infanticide (destruction of the newborn). The term describes the act; it may also refer to the person who commits it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The crime of destroying one's offspring, either in the womb or after birth; also, one who commits prolicide.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The crime of destroying one's offspring, either in the womb or after birth.
Editorial note: Common and legal usage are closely aligned here, which is unusual. The gap worth flagging is one of legal operability: in ordinary language, prolicide sounds like a freestanding crime. In legal practice, it has never functioned as a standalone charge. Courts and statutes instead prosecute the constituent acts — feticide, infanticide, abortion, or homicide — and prolicide appears almost exclusively in medical jurisprudence literature as a classificatory term, not a criminal count.
Common Confusion
Prolicide is frequently conflated with infanticide, but the terms are not interchangeable. Infanticide refers specifically to killing after birth; prolicide includes both prenatal and postnatal destruction and is the broader category. Similarly, feticide refers only to destruction in utero. Researchers encountering prolicide in historical sources should not assume the authority is discussing newborn killing alone — the source may be addressing either or both subcategories. Anderson's Dictionary of Law resolves this efficiently by redirecting to HOMICIDE, signaling that prolicide has no independent legal standing apart from the homicide family of offenses.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Feticide: Destruction of the fetus in utero. Historically treated separately because questions of quickening, viability, and legal personhood complicate the analysis. In modern law, feticide statutes vary significantly by jurisdiction.
Infanticide: Destruction of a newborn infant after live birth. Historically prosecuted as murder; some jurisdictions have created separate, lesser offenses recognizing the role of postpartum mental illness.
Why It Matters in Research
Prolicide is a research term, not a charging term. Researchers who encounter it in historical legal texts — particularly 19th-century medical jurisprudence treatises — should treat it as a gateway to the feticide/infanticide distinction rather than as evidence of a recognized criminal category. The term appears most heavily in medico-legal literature of the Victorian era, where physicians and lawyers collaborated on taxonomies of death.
Historical sources may use prolicide, feticide, and infanticide inconsistently. Some writers use prolicide only for postnatal killing; others use it as the umbrella. Black's Law Dictionary is the clearest in drawing the two-part division, and researchers should use Black's definition as the anchor when interpreting ambiguous historical usage.
The legal landscape governing each subtype has changed dramatically. Feticide law in the United States is now deeply entangled with abortion jurisprudence and fetal personhood debates — research trails that did not exist in any meaningful form when the historical dictionaries were written. Infanticide in England developed its own statutory framework (Infanticide Act 1922, revised 1938), while American jurisdictions largely retained homicide prosecutions. The Law Mind corpus may contain sources that use prolicide without distinguishing which subcategory is meant; context and date of the source are essential to interpretation.
Anderson's cross-reference to HOMICIDE is a deliberate signal: prolicide has no autonomous doctrinal body. Researchers building a literature review should index under feticide and infanticide for substantive law, and under prolicide only when tracking the history of classification itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the most structured treatment, explicitly dividing prolicide into feticide and infanticide and citing Ryan's Medical Jurisprudence — a standard 19th-century medico-legal text — as authority. This sourcing pattern confirms that prolicide entered legal vocabulary through medicine rather than through courts or legislatures.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law takes the opposite approach, declining to define prolicide independently and redirecting entirely to HOMICIDE. This is not an omission but an editorial judgment: Anderson treats prolicide as lacking sufficient independent legal content to warrant its own entry. The divergence between Black's and Anderson's approaches reflects a genuine tension in the literature — is prolicide a useful classificatory tool (Black's view) or merely a synonym cluster that dissolves into existing homicide doctrine (Anderson's view)?
Webster's 1913 matches the legal sources closely, suggesting that by the late 19th century the term had a stable meaning across both popular and professional usage. Neither dictionary adds doctrinal depth — both treat prolicide as definitional rather than analytical.
What the historical sources miss entirely: the constitutional and statutory complexity that now surrounds feticide specifically. No 19th-century legal dictionary could anticipate how abortion jurisprudence would fracture the uniform treatment of prenatal killing. Modern researchers must supplement historical dictionary entries with current statutory research.
Jurisdictional Note
Feticide and infanticide — prolicide's constituent subcategories — are governed by sharply different statutory regimes across U.S. jurisdictions, and both are affected by ongoing legislative and constitutional developments. Researchers should not assume that any historical or comparative source on prolicide maps onto current law in their target jurisdiction without independent verification.