Infanticide

Infanticide is the killing of a very young child, typically an infant within the first year of life, by a parent or another caregiver. Many legal systems treat infanticide as a distinct offense separate from ordinary murder or manslaughter, most commonly by recognizing a mother's diminished mental capacity in the period following childbirth as a mitigating circumstance that reduces what would otherwise be a murder charge to a lesser offense carrying a substantially reduced sentence, a doctrine several jurisdictions codify under statutes bearing the offense's own name. Where no such dedicated statute exists, the killing of an infant is instead prosecuted as murder or manslaughter under the general homicide law, with the caregiver's mental state at the time investigated through the same forensic and psychiatric evidence used in any other homicide case. Criminologists and public-health researchers study infanticide both as a historical practice, documented across many societies and periods under widely varying degrees of social and legal tolerance, and as a modern clinical and legal question closely tied to research on postpartum mental illness and its role in criminal responsibility.