As such in Attorney General's Reference No. 3 of 1994 where a husband stabbed his pregnant wife, causing premature birth, and the baby died due to that premature birth, in English law no murder took place. "Until she had been born alive and acquired a separate existence she could not be the victim of homicide". The requirement for murder under English law, involving transfer of malice to a fetus, and then (notionally) from a fetus to the born child with legal personality, who died as a child at a later time despite never having suffered harm as a child with legal personality, nor even as a fetus having suffered any fatal wound (the injury sustained as a fetus was not a contributory cause), nor having malice deliberately directed at it, was described as legally "too far" to support a murder charge.