Back to that unpleasant topic

I have briefly noted before that Japan had an issue with widespread infanticide during the Edo period (1603 - 1868)*, when mentioning that it was reported by anthropologists as common in aboriginal society, but I have not read anything before about the situation in Europe around the same time. 

It would seem that evidence for it being pretty widespread there, too, in the same period, may have been staring us in the face for a long time:

"Routine" infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe was a much more widespread practice than previously thought, a new book posits.  

This fresh insight sits at the heart of a new book, "Death Control in the West 1500–1800: Sex Ratios at Baptism in Italy, France and England, "by Gregory Hanlon and contributors....

Hanlon, who is Distinguished Research Professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, calls attention to the limited scope of existing scholarship, which has never focused on sex ratios of infants brought for baptism within hours or days after their birth.

These records reveal startling spikes in the number of male baptisms in the aftermath of famines or diseases.

He notes, "Historians in the West have relied almost exclusively on records of criminal trials in which unwed mothers or married women carrying progeny not sired by their husbands hid their pregnancies and killed their newborns alone or with female accomplices. Married infanticidal mothers may have been a hundred times more numerous."

Hanlon's research suggests that in rural Tuscany at the height of infanticide the victims might have constituted up to a third of the total number of live births. 

Using baptismal registers and ecclesiastical censuses drawn from scores of parishes in Italy, France and England, Hanlon shows similar infanticide patterns across city and country, for Catholics, Calvinists and Anglicans alike.

In Italy's rural 17th century Tuscany, Hanlon suggests that parents seemed willing to sacrifice a child if they were a twin, opting to keep just one of the newborns. In the north Italian city of Parma, Laura Hynes Jenkins found that working-class parents preferred girls over boys.

The question of how the baby was dealt with was important for the legal consequences:

Hanlon calls attention to lax punitive measures taken for crimes of infanticide, and notes, "Tribunals operated against single mothers almost exclusively, but only if they killed the newborn deliberately. Simple abandonment was not a comparable offense."

It seems almost hard to believe that the sex ratios of children being baptised has never been examined before for this type of research - but it seems hard to imagine that obvious large differences in sex ratios could be explained in any other way.

I would also comment that this shows that the pro-life anti-abortion movement, when it emphasises women's guilt over having an abortion as a reason not to have one, is pretty clearly ignoring the historical evidence of psychological ability of parents to not regret ending their own child's life for very economically pragmatic reasons.   (Not, I should hasten to add, that I am trying to make a case for the return of baby killing or abandonment...) 

 

* You can watch a Youtube explanation here done by an animation channel that is pretty good on explaining Japanese history and culture, actually.