Infanticide

[Olde Crone]

The current Lost Cousins newsletter has a piece about a Canadian professor who has researched Italian French and English birth/death parish registers and has concluded that the poor used infanticide as a means of birth control! His reasoning is that so many infants died. I find this hard to believe - yes, lots of infant deaths, but in my extended family, still plenty of survivors to make economic poverty inevitable.

Notably, my 6 x ggps had 19 children of whom only three survived to adulthood. The first six children all died in the space of three weeks of smallpox (unless the parents lied to the Vicar of course). Another 10 died at ages between 0-16 of unrecorded causes but I doubt they were murdered for eating too much, for instance.

My ancestors all had big families, most of whom survived to adulthood. I have never suspected infanticide, perhaps that makes me naive. I'm sure it must have happened occasionally in the general population but I feel that fear of god, if nothing else, would have made it quite rare and certainly not a widespread form of birth control.

I look forward to reading the Professor's book so that I can pick holes in it!

OC

[Phoenix]

Oh gosh, that sounds like the learned article I read that suggested that because Melancthon Smith and Sarah had a child baptised, and then Melancthon had a child with Mary, he must have been changing partners. I personally thought that the vicar was deaf, and misheard Sary (or just wasn't interested in the wives)

[Phoenix]

There obviously were cases of infanticide, and the authorities seemed to divide them into two categories:

The mother who gave birth, and then (suffering from what we would probably call post-natal depression) killed the child. Such cases were usually treated leniently, as the mother had not intended to kill.

The mother who concealed her pregnancy from the world, with the intention of killing the baby. That was regarded as murder. (There has been a recent, well-publicised example of this)

[Phoenix]

Surely, where mothers did have a problem, they were far more likely to opt for abortion? We have always been tried by our peers, as they are the people most likely to judge us fairly. I cannot imagine that a community would acquiese to murder. If a child drowned or fell in a fire, there was an inquest. Judging by reports in the newspapers, where children were ill-treated, the community was horrified. Had this been really commonplace, nobody would have blinked an eye, and it would not have been newsworthy.

[Phoenix]

Okay, this child was 15, when she died in 1850, but the situation clearly horrified everyone.

https://search.findmypast.co.uk/bna/...s%20chulmleigh

[ElizabethHerts]

Originally Posted by Phoenix

Okay, this child was 15, when she died in 1850, but the situation clearly horrified everyone.

https://search.findmypast.co.uk/bna/...s%20chulmleigh

Horrific.


The name of the Reverend - Rev. J. T. Pine Coffin.
I did a double take!

[Mary from Italy]

I've come across one case of probable infanticide so far (unfortunately my GG-grandmother* was involved in the cover-up). The child was born to an unmarried girl, though, not a married couple. The mother and grandmother were found not guilty, because the pathologist said he couldn't be 100% sure it wasn't a natural death, but I don't think there was much doubt about it, otherwise there would have been no need for a cover-up:

https://magazine.familytreeforum.com/?p=63.

* Actually she turned out not to be my GG-grandmother at all, but I thought she was when I wrote the article. Her son was my grandmother's mother's husband, but turned out not to be her biological father.

[Olde Crone]

Sorry, I should have said "between 1600 and 1800" . I still don't believe it though, because there would have been enough people who saw infanticide as a crime, to make it unlikely that everyone would get away with it.

OC

[Merry]

This sounds as unlikely as the expert who said middle aged men who lost their wives would then produce more children with their older daughters, and wrote this as if it was commonplace.

I have read quite a few contemporary newspaper articles about infanticide cases and generally they seemed to be young unmarried girls away from home and in service who concealed their pregnancy, gave birth in silence and sometimes in the middle of the night in a shared bedroom, and then removed the child to an outhouse or some such where the body was then found within a short time by another servant. There would then be a lot of questions over whether the baby had cried or taken a breath etc. Everyone involved was very shocked and the mother - whether she was formerly punished or not - had to survive an inquest and court case and her personal life being splashed all over the papers for friends and relatives to gossip over. I realise maybe it would only be the more obvious cases that would end up in a court room, but I really don't think the majority of women would be ready to suffocate their child because the baby was inconvenient or whatever.