Short answer. One fact decides it: the age of the victim. Killing a child less than three days old is infanticide, no matter who does it or how. Past that age, the same act becomes parricide, murder or homicide depending on the relationship and the circumstances.
What the law says
The penalty provided for parricide in article 246 and for murder in article 248 shall be imposed upon any person who shall kill any child less than three days of age.
Revised Penal Code, Article 255 — Infanticide Of A Newborn. Read the full provision →
Seventy-two hours is the whole test
Article 255 of the Revised Penal Code fixes the boundary at less than three days of age. Inside that window the offence is infanticide and the offender can be anyone — a parent, a relative, a stranger, a midwife. Outside it, the ordinary rules take over: a parent who kills his own child commits parricide, and a stranger commits murder or homicide. The child must have been born alive. If the foetus never lived independently of the mother, the crime is abortion, not infanticide, and that distinction is usually settled by medical evidence about breathing and separate existence rather than by the parties' accounts.
The penalty borrows from two other articles
Article 255 supplies no penalty of its own. It imports the penalty for parricide where the offender is a relative within that article's coverage, and the penalty for murder where he is not. Parricide, as the Code puts it, punishes a person who kills his father, mother, or child, whether legitimate or illegitimate, or any of his ascendants or descendants, or his spouse, and the stated penalty runs to death. That reference must be read subject to Republic Act No. 9346 (2006), which prohibits the imposition of the death penalty in the Philippines; reclusion perpetua is imposed in its place where this Code's nomenclature is used.
The concealment-of-dishonour reduction
The article contains an unusual and much lighter alternative. If the killing is committed by the mother of the child for the purpose of concealing her dishonour, the penalty drops to prision correccional in its medium and maximum periods. If the maternal grandparents, or either of them, act for that same purpose, the penalty is prision mayor. Note how narrow this is: it is available only to the mother and the maternal grandparents, and only where concealing dishonour was the actual purpose. The father cannot invoke it, the paternal grandparents cannot, and neither can a mother whose motive was something else.
What surrounds a case like this in practice
Prosecutions here frequently involve a very young or frightened mother, a concealed pregnancy, and an unattended birth, and the evidence is medical before it is anything else — whether the child breathed, how long it lived, the cause of death. Special laws on child protection and on violence against women and their children often bear on the same facts and may govern how the case is handled. Anyone in this situation, on either side, needs a lawyer early rather than after a sworn statement has been given. Nobody can promise how a prosecution will end. This is general legal information, not advice; to have a case reviewed, you can book a consultation.
Related provisions
- Revised Penal Code, Article 255 — Infanticide Of A Newborn
- Revised Penal Code, Article 246 — Parricide: Killing A Relative