Posthumous birth


A posthumous birth is the birth of a child after the death of a parent. A person born in these circumstances is called a posthumous child or a posthumously born person. Most instances of posthumous birth involve the birth of a child after the death of their father, but the term is also applied to infants delivered shortly after the death of the mother, usually by caesarean section.

Legal implications

Posthumous birth has special implications in law, potentially affecting the child's citizenship and legal rights, inheritance, and order of succession. Legal systems generally include special provisions regarding inheritance by posthumous children and the legal status of such children. For example, Massachusetts law states that a posthumous child is treated as having been living at the death of the parent, meaning that the child receives the same share of the parent's estate as if the child had been born before the parent's death. Most states recognize a posthumous child born within a set time frame, normally 280 to 300 days after the death of the decedent father.
Another emerging legal issue in the United States is the control of genetic material after the death of the donor. United States law holds that posthumous children of U.S. citizens who are born outside the United States have the same rights to citizenship that they would have had if the deceased U.S. citizen parent had been alive at the time of their birth. In the field of assisted reproduction, snowflake children, i.e. those "adopted" as frozen embryos by people unrelated to them, can result in the birth of a child after the death of one or both of their genetic parents.

In monarchies and nobilities

A posthumous birth has special significance in the case of hereditary monarchies and hereditary noble titles following primogeniture. In this system, a monarch's or peer's own child precedes that monarch's or peer's sibling in the order of succession. In cases where the widow of a childless king or nobleman is pregnant at the time of his death, the next-in-line is not permitted to assume the throne or title, but must yield place to the unborn child, or ascends and reigns or succeeds until the child is born.
In monarchies and noble titles that follow male-preference cognatic primogeniture, the situation is similar where the dead monarch or peer was not childless but left a daughter as the next-in-line, as well as a pregnant widow. A posthumous brother would supplant that daughter in the succession, whereas a posthumous sister, being younger, would not. Similarly, in monarchies and noble titles that follow agnatic primogeniture, the sex of the unborn child determines the succession; a posthumous male child would himself succeed, whereas the next-in-line would succeed upon the birth of a posthumous female child.

Modern complications

Posthumous conception by artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization, whether done using sperm or ova stored before a parent's death or posthumous [sperm retrieval|sperm retrieved from a man's corpse], has created new legal issues. When a woman is inseminated with her deceased husband's sperm, laws that establish that a sperm donor is not the legal father of the child born as a result of artificial insemination have had the effect of excluding the deceased husband from fatherhood and making the child legally fatherless.
In the United Kingdom before 2000, birth records of children conceived using a dead man's sperm had to identify the infants as fatherless, but in 2000 the government announced that the law would be changed to allow the deceased father's name to be listed on the birth certificate. In 1986, a New South Wales legal reform commission recommended that the law should recognize the deceased husband as the father of a child born from post-mortem artificial insemination, provided that the woman is his widow and unmarried at the time of birth, but the child should have inheritance rights to the father's estate only if the father left a will that included specific provisions for the child.
In 2001, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was asked to consider whether the father's name should appear on the birth record for a child conceived through artificial insemination after her father's death, as well as whether that child was eligible for U.S. Social Security benefits. The court ruled in January 2002 that a child could be the legal heir of a dead parent if there was a genetic relationship and the deceased parent had both agreed to the posthumous conception and committed to support the child. Different U.S. state courts and federal appellate courts have ruled differently in similar cases. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Astrue v. Capato that twins born 18 months after their father's death using the father's frozen sperm were not eligible for Social Security benefits, which set a new precedent.

Naming

In the Middle Ages, it was traditional for posthumous children born in England to be given a matronymic surname instead of a patronymic one. This may in part explain why matronyms are more common in England than in other parts of Europe.
In Ancient Rome, posthumous children of noble birth were often given the cognomen 'Postumus'. One example is Agrippa Postumus.
In Yoruba culture, posthumous children are given names that refer to the circumstances concerning the birth. Examples of this include Bàbárímisá, meaning that the Father saw and ran; Yeyérínsá, meaning that the mother saw and ran; Ikúdáyísí, which means that death spared the child; and Ẹnúyàmí, meaning that "I was surprised", referring to the fact that the tragic death of the father, mother, or both was sudden and surprising for the family.

Notable people born posthumously

Antiquity

Middle Ages

16th–18th centuries

19th century

20th century

Posthumous birth after the mother's death

It can happen that the mother dies before giving birth. This usually results in the death of the child, but in exceptional cases the child, surgically removed from the mother's womb, can survive.
There is only a handful of such records. The most famous is perhaps the case of Raymond Nonnatus, the Spanish saint in the Middle Ages, who was born this way. His Latin adjective also suggests this.
Another instance was Christopher Vasa, Prince of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Kingdom of Sweden, who was the youngest child of King Sigismund Vasa and Queen Anne of Austria. Anne died while still pregnant and her son was delivered alive via caesarean section. The newborn Prince ultimately died few minutes after birth, on 10 February 1598.
A similar case is reported by Andrea Majocchi, an Italian doctor who mentions in his book a case where two live babies were removed from their mother's womb before delivery and brought to the doctor, but there they suddenly died.
In 2024, a Palestinian baby was removed from her mother's womb at 30 weeks gestation after her mother was killed in a drone strike. The baby died in the incubator a few days later.
Modern medical technologies allow homeostasis and overall organ function to be maintained in brain-dead pregnant women to ensure proper development of the fetus, leading to the successful delivery of a healthy child.
The so-called coffin birth is strongly distinguished from the "birth" after the death of the mother. This is the inverse of the former. Here the baby is actually born but is already dead. It differs from the normal stillbirth in that here the mother is already dead too, and only the decomposition gases / contraction of the body inside her push out the baby's also dead body.

Religious and mythological people born posthumously

The Bible's Old Testament mentions two named cases of posthumous children: