Infanticide, which appears in modern criminal law as a privileged killing, has been known since ancient times, and the very term infanticide implies the killing of a newborn child by its mother. Most authors define infanticide as the killing of a newborn by its mother during or immediately after childbirth under the influence of a strong mental burden caused by pregnancy or childbirth. Since it is an extremely delicate crime, there have always been peculiarities in determining and sanctioning this crime. Therefore, this paper will present the origin, development, issues and most important determinants of infanticide with an emphasis on the various legislative solutions of the mentioned criminal offense throughout history and up to modern criminal legislation. The work also provides an insight into the position of women and their sanctioning during different historical periods, as well as changes in attitudes towards infanticide and its perpetrators, from cruel death sentences to privileging, while the central part of the thesis provides an insight into the contemporary regulation of infanticide in Croatia. After analyzing the criminal offense of infanticide within the Criminal Code of the Republic of Croatia from 1977 and the first Croatian Criminal Code from 1997th, the paper analyzes the definition and characteristics of the crime as it is currently regulated by the Criminal Code from 2011. In addition, the thesis elaborates the phenomenological movement of the criminal offense of infanticide, i.e. its frequency in a certain period of time, followed by a description of the criminal offense of infanticide in the practice of the Municipal Court in Čakovec through the case study method. Given that research shows that the perpetrators of infanticide are mostly young, economically dependent on others and most often come from rural areas, it will be explained how the social environment affects the perpetrators and their attitude towards their own child, pregnancy and infanticide, and also provides an insight into the different complex of motives that lead mothers to kill their newborns. It is a phenomenon that is not considered natural, so it causes outrage in society and the public, and despite numerous studies, it still raises many questions about how and why it happens.