The court would wait for the baby. It would not spare the mother.
Under English common law, a woman convicted of a capital crime who was found to be ‘quick with child’ — pregnant, past the point of detectable movement — received an automatic stay of execution until after she gave birth. The principle predates the witch trials by centuries and had nothing to do with mercy for the mother specifically: it existed to avoid punishing an unborn child for a crime it hadn't committed.
Elizabeth Proctor was one of the most prominent people caught in the outbreak. Her husband, John Proctor, was convicted alongside her and hanged on August 19, 1692 — one of the few men executed in the trials, and one whose blunt public skepticism of the girls' fits (see: Record 05) very likely accelerated his own conviction.
Elizabeth's sentence was stayed on account of her pregnancy. What saved her, in the end, wasn't leniency — it was timing. Spectral evidence was barred from the courts that October, the special court was dissolved, and by the time her case would have come back around for execution, the entire apparatus of the trials had collapsed. She gave birth, and eventually walked free.
It's worth being precise about what the exception actually was: a postponement with a clock attached, not a pardon. Had the trials continued running on their original schedule a few months longer, the stay would very likely have run out before it saved her.
The doctrine didn't end with the Proctors, or with the eighteenth century. Federal law today — 18 U.S. Code § 3596 — states plainly that a sentence of death shall not be carried out on a woman while she is pregnant, and twenty-five U.S. states carry near-identical language on their own books. The reasoning hasn't moved much in three hundred years: the law still isn't protecting the mother so much as refusing to punish a child for a sentence it didn't earn. What has changed is how seriously the gap between statute and practice gets taken — researchers have found that in roughly half of the states with these laws, actual execution protocols never mention pregnancy at all, meaning the protection exists on paper well before anyone has worked out how it would function in the death chamber. Elizabeth Proctor's stay worked because the entire system collapsed before her clock ran out. The law never promises that outcome. It only promises the postponement.
A delay is not mercy. It's scheduling.