... at the point that the system call completed. There are no guarantees from that point onwards.
Interestingly, it would only take the addition of a pdopen() to something like FreeBSD's pdkill() to get enough for a tool that opened a process descriptor, sent a signal to the process, and determined (with poll() and pdwait4()) whether the process then exited; with the open-descriptor-style interface guaranteeing that it was always referencing the same process.