Feticide

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Feticide as a legal term refers to the deliberate or incidental killing of a fetus due to a human act, e.g. a punch or kick in the abdomen of a pregnant woman. It does not refer to the death of a fetus from entirely natural causes, or through the spontaneous abortion of a pregnancy where the life of the fetus could not be maintained artificially ex utero.

Feticide is punishable as a crime in many jurisdictions. In the USA, more than half of the states have criminalized feticide[link], although feticide associated with a legal abortion is not a crime.[link]

In India the term is used to refer to the widely condemned practice of killing female fetuses in an effort to secure male offspring while not having too many children.

Feticide as a medical term has two meanings; 1. Termination of a fetus as the first phase of a legal abortion from around gestational week 21 (sometimes referred to as fetocide) PMID 12521492; 2. Legal abortion. [link][link] . Around 50% of the articles on abortion indexed by [PubMed] contain the word feticide.

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