Definition
"Quick with child" is an archaic legal phrase describing a pregnant woman at the stage of pregnancy at which fetal movement — known as quickening — has been felt. Historically, quickening marked the legally and medically significant threshold at which the fetus was considered to have independent life for purposes of criminal law, particularly abortion and homicide.
At common law, a woman was "quick with child" once she could perceive fetal movement, typically occurring between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. Before quickening, the destruction of a pregnancy was not regarded as a criminal offense under English common law. After quickening, the act could constitute a misdemeanor or, in some formulations, a more serious offense. The phrase does not describe a medical diagnosis but a perceptible event communicated by the pregnant woman herself.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Quick" in this phrase retains an archaic English sense meaning "alive" or "living," as in "the quick and the dead." The phrase "quick with child" therefore means literally "alive with child" or "carrying a living child."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defines "quick" in this context as "living; alive," citing "the quick and the dead" as the standard formulation. The phrase "with child" is defined as pregnant.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. To a modern reader, "quick" almost exclusively means fast or rapid. The legal and older common meaning — alive, living — has nearly disappeared from ordinary English. A researcher encountering "quick with child" in historical legal sources without this context might misread the phrase entirely. The legal weight of the term has nothing to do with speed; it concerns the legal recognition of fetal life as marked by perceptible movement.
Common Confusion
"Quick with child" is sometimes conflated with simple pregnancy ("with child"). The two are not synonymous in historical law. A woman could be "with child" — that is, pregnant — without yet being "quick with child." The distinction controlled criminal liability in abortion cases and appeared in discussions of the benefit of the belly (a pregnant woman's right to delay execution). Only a woman who was quick with child, not merely pregnant, was typically entitled to a stay of execution under the plea of pregnancy at common law.
The phrase should also be distinguished from modern viability doctrine in constitutional law, which marks a different threshold (survival outside the womb, typically around 22–24 weeks) and serves a different legal function.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational essential for researchers working in historical criminal law, reproductive law history, or any corpus materials predating the twentieth century. Several traps exist:
First, the quickening standard was the dominant Anglo-American legal rule for abortion criminality from the medieval period through much of the nineteenth century. State abortion statutes enacted in the mid-1800s progressively abandoned the quickening distinction, criminalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Researchers reading statutes or cases from the 1820s through the 1880s must track whether a given jurisdiction had moved away from the common law quickening threshold.
Second, the phrase appears in the plea of the belly — a procedural device allowing a convicted woman to plead pregnancy to delay execution. Historical sources are not consistent about whether mere pregnancy or quick-with-child status was required. Bouvier's and treatise writers sometimes use the terms interchangeably, which can mislead.
Third, the evidentiary problem is distinctive: quickening was self-reported by the woman and assessed by a jury of matrons, not by medical examination. Primary source records of such proceedings require understanding this procedural context.
Fourth, in the Law Mind corpus, this term connects to discussions of abortion history, homicide (specifically feticide and the question of whether destruction of a fetus could constitute homicide), and procedural history of the plea of pregnancy. It does not connect well to modern child abuse or child endangerment doctrine, which operates on entirely different foundations.
Historical Dictionary Support
The source material for the historical dictionary entries is fragmentary for this term. Black's cross-references to "quicken" and Bouvier's to "quick" without preserving a full entry in the excerpts provided. This is itself informative: both dictionaries treated the concept as self-evident or subsumed it under related headings rather than defining it as a standalone term.
Historical legal dictionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consistently treated quickening as the dividing line for criminal liability in abortion cases. Blackstone's Commentaries, a foundational reference point for these dictionaries, distinguished between an offense before and after quickening. Later American treatise writers, including Joel Bishop in his criminal law treatises, reflected the progressive statutory abolition of the quickening distinction while still defining the phrase for purposes of understanding older law.
What historical sources tend to miss: they rarely explain the evidentiary procedure (the jury of matrons) or the subjective nature of the quickening determination. A researcher relying solely on dictionary definitions will not understand how contested the threshold was in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The quickening distinction was common law doctrine inherited by American states, but statutory reform moved at different rates across jurisdictions. Some states abolished the distinction as early as the 1820s (New York); others retained it into the latter half of the nineteenth century. For any research involving a specific state's abortion law history, the relevant state statutes must be consulted directly — dictionary definitions of "quick with child" will not capture these variations.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia, criminal_46: Child Abuse and Child Endangerment — for background on legal treatment of harm to unborn children and the historical development of protective criminal law in this area.