The criminal law deals with the cognate offenses which make up infanticide in the following manner, whether the child is legitimate or illegitimate: As regards the pro curing of abortion, every woman who takes poison or other noxious thing or uses instru ments or other means to procure her miscarriage, is guilty of felony, and liable to penal servitude for life, or not less than three years; and so is any person who administers poison or uses instruments upon the woman with such intent. Whoever supplies drugs, poison, or instruments for the same purpose is guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to penal servitude for three years. The concealment of birth is also made criminal offense. Whoever, after a child is born, by any secret disposition of the body, endeavors to conceal its birth, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to imprisonment for two years. This is the offense which, perhaps, is most frequently committed, or at least made the subject of prosecution in such cases, as the attempt to establish the larger crime of murder to the satisfaction of a jury, is frequently foiled by the secret sympathy shown towards the mother, who is presumed to have been the victim of seduction, or otherwise wronged. The existence of this offense shows the necessity which every woman likely to become a mother labors under of making public her situation to some extent. As the destruction of children may be effected by the negative fact of not supplying food and clothing, as well as by the positive act of wounding or ill-treating, the refusal or neglect of a parent or other person who is bound by law to supply food and clothing to the child, and neg lects to do so, thereby causing its death, amounts either to murder or manslaughter, according to the circumstances. Moreover, the unlawful abandoning or exposure of any child under the age of two years, whereby the life and health of the child are endangered, is a misdemeanor punishable with three years' penal servitude. Where a person is
charged with the murder of a very young child, it is essential to prove that the child was • in life. The test of this is not that it breathed, or had an independent circulation after it was separated from the mother, but it is enough that the child was fully born; hence, if a man strike a woman with child, so as to cause the death of the child, he is neither guilty'of murder nor of manslaughter of the child. The judges of England, in 1848, had to deliberately consider whether though a child was still attached to the navel-string, the killing of it was murder, and they held that it was. In all eases of the murder of infants, the question whether the child was fully born, and so the subject of murder, is generally one of medical jurisprudence, upon which medical skill is needed to throw light, and medical men have certain well-known tests for ascertaining this important fact. The above offenses in reference to infanticide are punished in a similar manner in Scotland.
It has been stated that an inquest is held daily upon the bodies of children destreyed• through the design, the neglect, the ignorance, or the mental infirmity of the mothers. Even when the act may fairly be regarded as a crime, its enormity is generally greatly lessened in the eye of the law by the consideration of the physical condition and moral disturbance of the parent.
A further protection was given to infant life by an act of 1872, which obliges those who undertake for hire to nurse infants under the age of one year, to have their house registered, and to keep records of the children they take charge of. They must also give notice to the coroner or procurator-fiscal of such infants' deaths.