The word ‘increase’ in a will legally captured unborn enslaved children

Evidence

Tena was my great-great-grandmother Renty Taylor Thompson’s mom. I realized that she must have been pregnant with him at the time of Benjamin Taylor’s death, or close thereafter. Hence her “increase” was my great-grandfather, the same man who told my mother so many of the oral stories she had passed on to me. The timing made sense, as Benjamin Taylor died in 1851 and Renty Taylor Thompson was born shortly thereafter. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 398

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the property term ‘increase’ operated to claim an enslaved person before birth — legally load-bearing for the reader’s demonstration of property law as the afterlife of slavery.
• QUESTION: The precise legal mechanics of ‘increase’ as including unborn children deserve deeper doctrinal exploration.