[Ruling on a woman who poured a drink into her relative’s child and he choked and died]

The answer – and Allah is the One who grants success – is that the woman who poured the drink into the child’s mouth is not liable if she was not transgressing, but she is liable if she was transgressing.
Transgression is: that the woman knows that this drink causes choking, or that she is negligent in pouring it, so that she pours more than a child of his like can bear – whether by the size of the draught, or by repeatedly pouring – while knowing the danger involved in that. This is on the assumption that it does indeed cause choking.
What appears to me is that choking is a condition that occurs in a human being – whether small or large – not because of the drink or food. For this reason, a person may choke on water in rare instances, and may likewise choke on food. Choking is a human trait that occurs in a person without there being a cause that goes back to the drink or food.
A person may choke on his own saliva, or on what comes up from the stomach of zughr (which may be called phlegm), or he may choke on what descends from the head. I myself have seen some people choke in their sleep; they leap up from their sleep like a madman, unable to speak because of the intensity of the choking.
Thus, choking – as we have mentioned – is a trait with which Allah has created human beings; it does not occur except when Allah permits it to occur, and a person is not able to protect himself completely from its occurrence.
If it is said: Is it not transgression that the woman pours a drink into a child who is not hers without permission?
We say: A woman’s pouring a drink into the child of her sister, or her relative, or her friend is not counted as transgression, because such women are as if they have been given permission by the mother and father. Indeed, the parents regard such an act as kindness. This is the general “law” (custom) among people.
If it is said: The child may be full and satiated with food and drink; if the unrelated woman then takes him and pours a drink into his mouth, he will be harmed, so she has injured the child unintentionally and therefore must be liable for the mistaken injury that resulted from her.
We say: If the child is in such a state, he will not accept food or drink, as we see and observe from what we know of children. In that case, no injury occurs that would entail liability – and what we mean here concerns choking in particular.
Yes, what we have mentioned here accords with what the scholars of the madhhab mention in this chapter, where they said: “The nurse (ḥāḍinah) is liable if a child dies due to her negligence while she knows that he will die because of that negligence.” And where they said: “There is nothing (no liability) in what results from conjugal relations of a sound wife in the usual manner,” and the like.

Source: Min Thimār al-ʿIlm wa al-Ḥikmah vol.2