Today's Infanticidal Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the 18th century, infanticide was practiced frequently as a way of
the poor ridding themselves of children they could not afford to
support. Most cases of what the law might have considered negligent
or deliberate infanticide were passed off as accidents (such as
druggings or starvation). In the 18th century it was not uncommon to
see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills
of London and other large cities. Eventually Parliament decided to
intervene and set up foundling hospitals with various systems for
collecting unwanted infants without risk to the donor. On the
Continent, infants were passed through revolving boxes set in the
walls of foundling hospitals. However, government was not capable of
sustaining the cost of rearing children to adulthood, and foundling
hospitals became de facto slaughterhouses whose prime function was to
authenticate the state's claim to a monopoly over the right to kill.
Between 1753 and 1760 there were 15,000 admissions to London's first
foundling hospital; of those admitted, only 4,400 survived to
adolescence. Additional thousands of foundlings continued to be
destroyed by wet nurses employed by parish workhouses. In order to
economize, parish officers assigned the infants to women who were
nicknamed "killing nurses" or "she-butchers" because "no child ever
escaped their care alive." Between 80 and 90 percent of the children
in these institutions died during their first year of life.
Culled from: Cannibals And Kings: The Origins Of Cultures by Marvin
Harris
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