Documented Cases of Enslaved Mothers Killing Infants to Prevent Enslavement

Colonial court records from Virginia and Maryland in the 1680s–1690s document cases of enslaved women who killed their newborn children rather than allow them to be born into slavery. These acts, prosecuted as infanticide under colonial law, were understood by contemporaries as desperate resistance to the hereditary enslavement enforced by the partus principle. Historians have documented these cases as evidence of the psychological devastation of slavery and of enslaved women's determination to exercise some agency over their children's fate, even at the ultimate cost.