## Facts

- A pregnant woman (four to five months gestation) fell due to an alleged defect in a public highway maintained by the Town of Northampton.
- The fall allegedly caused a miscarriage; the fetus was not sufficiently developed to survive premature birth.
- Evidence suggested the fetus showed signs of life after delivery and lived briefly (about ten to fifteen minutes).
- The mother separately recovered damages in her own action against the town for her injuries.
- The estate’s administrator brought a wrongful death action under a Massachusetts statute for the benefit of the mother as next of kin, alleging the town’s negligence caused the child’s death.

## Issues

1. Whether a wrongful death action may be maintained for a child’s death allegedly caused by injuries inflicted while the child was in utero.
2. Whether a nonviable fetus at the time of injury has the separate legal existence required to be treated as a “person” whose death can support statutory recovery.
3. Whether criminal-law concepts regarding a child born alive after prenatal injury can supply the rule of civil tort liability.

## Decision

- The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts overruled the plaintiff’s exceptions and left in place the trial court’s ruling that the action could not be maintained.
- The court held no wrongful death claim lay on these facts because the claimed injury occurred while the fetus was in the womb and was not a separate legal person at that time.
- The court declined to extend civil liability based on criminal-law authorities concerning homicide where a child is born alive and later dies from prenatal injury.

## Legal Principles

- A wrongful death action requires that the decedent be a legally recognized person capable of having a civil cause of action.
- Absent recognized civil authority allowing an infant to sue for prenatal injuries, the court would not create such a cause of action by implication from a death statute.
- At the stage of development involved, the fetus was treated in law as part of the mother rather than as an independent person with its own tort claim.
- Criminal-law rules concerning prenatal injury (including the “born alive” concept) do not determine the scope of civil tort liability, particularly where those rules depend on developmental thresholds not contained in a civil theory.

## Conclusion

The court refused to permit a statutory wrongful death action based on alleged prenatal injuries to a nonviable fetus, reasoning that the fetus lacked separate legal personhood at the time of injury and that criminal-law analogies did not justify extending civil liability.


Dietrich v. Inhabitants of Northampton, 138 Mass. 14 (Mass. 1884)