Definition
The first perceptible movement of a fetus felt by the mother during pregnancy, typically occurring around the sixteenth week of gestation, though the range historically cited extends from the tenth to the twenty-fifth week. In medical jurisprudence, quickening served for centuries as a legally significant threshold in abortion law, distinguishing a pregnancy before fetal movement from one after — a distinction that carried direct consequences for criminal liability.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle of "quicken"; to make faster, more lively, or more active.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The first motion of the fetus in the womb felt by the mother, occurring usually about the middle of the term of pregnancy. It has been popularly supposed to be due to the fetus becoming possessed of independent life."
Webster's 1913 captures the common and legal meanings in near-perfect alignment because the legal term was itself derived from popular understanding of fetal life. The divergence is contextual rather than definitional: in ordinary language, quickening is simply a biological event; in law, it was a threshold that triggered or negated criminal punishment. The lay assumption embedded in the term — that quickening signified the beginning of independent life — was not merely folk belief but was formally absorbed into common law doctrine.
Common Confusion
Quickening should not be conflated with viability. Viability is the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, a standard that became constitutionally operative in modern abortion jurisprudence. Quickening is an earlier, subjectively perceived event (maternal sensation of movement) with no necessary relationship to survivability. Researchers reading historical sources must be careful: before the twentieth century, quickening was the dominant legal threshold; viability displaced it only with the development of modern obstetric medicine and, in U.S. constitutional law, with Roe v. Wade (1973) and its progeny. The two terms address different questions and belong to different legal eras.
Why It Matters in Research
Quickening is a term that has undergone near-complete doctrinal obsolescence, which creates a substantial interpretive trap for researchers working across time periods.
In pre-twentieth-century common law sources, quickening was the operative dividing line in abortion prosecutions. An abortion induced before quickening was generally not indictable as a criminal offense at common law; after quickening, it could constitute a serious crime. This rule appears in English common law, was carried into early American law, and shaped nineteenth-century state statutes. Researchers examining historical abortion indictments, medical jurisprudence treatises, or nineteenth-century state penal codes will encounter quickening as a formal legal element — its presence or absence in the record is determinative of the charge.
In modern legal sources, the term is largely absent from operative doctrine. Post-1973 constitutional abortion law reorganized analysis around viability and trimester frameworks, rendering quickening analytically obsolete as a legal threshold. A researcher who searches only modern databases for quickening will find little of doctrinal significance; a researcher who searches only historical sources will find it everywhere.
The Bouvier entry is particularly valuable for flagging the conceptual underpinning: the legal significance of quickening rested on a now-rejected biological assumption — that the fetus either was not alive before quickening or acquired some new legal status at that moment. Understanding that the doctrine was grounded in pre-modern embryology explains both its historical durability and its eventual displacement.
Anderson's cross-reference to ABORTION and PREGNANCY is the correct navigational move for researchers: quickening cannot be understood in isolation from the broader doctrinal history of abortion law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the factual definition without significant disagreement: quickening is the mother's first felt perception of fetal movement, typically around the middle of pregnancy. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree on the approximate timing and the medical jurisprudence context. Bouvier adds the most texture, citing Denman's Midwifery for the gestational range and explicitly noting the former legal and popular assumption about fetal life at quickening — a detail absent from Black's but essential for understanding why the doctrine existed at all.
Black's second edition is the most useful for corpus researchers because it appends case citations (Commonwealth v. Parker, State v. Cooper, Evans v. People) that allow direct access to nineteenth-century American courts applying the quickening rule. These cases illustrate the doctrine in operation and reveal how courts treated the threshold as both a factual question for the jury and a legal element of the offense.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the doctrine's dissolution. None of the shelf sources could anticipate the constitutional transformation of abortion law in the twentieth century, and none signals that quickening would cease to function as a legal concept. Researchers must supply that trajectory themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
The quickening rule was received into American law from English common law but was modified or abrogated by statute in many states during the nineteenth century. Some state legislatures criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy regardless of quickening; others codified the common law threshold. The picture is not uniform, and researchers working on a specific state's history must examine that state's statutory record rather than relying on the general common law rule.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Abortion Law — Historical Development; Medical Jurisprudence — Fetal Life and Legal Status