The young woman who could not provide for an unwanted child had few choices, especially if she had no prospect of marriage. Abortions were illegal, dangerous, and apparently rare. In desperation, some women, particularly in the countryside, hid unwanted pregnancies, delivered in secret, and smothered their newborn infants. The punishment for infanticide was death. Yet across Europe, convictions for infanticide dropped in the second half of the eighteenth century, testimony, perhaps, to growing social awareness of the crushing pressures caused by unwanted pregnancies.

582

Another sign of this awareness was the spread of homes for abandoned children in cities across Europe. Homes for abandoned children first took hold in Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the sixteenth century, spreading to France in 1670 and the rest of Europe thereafter. In eighteenth-century England the government acted on a petition calling for a foundling hospital “to prevent the frequent murders of poor, miserable infants at birth” and “to suppress the inhuman custom of exposing newborn children to perish in the streets.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, European foundling hospitals were admitting annually about one hundred thousand abandoned children, nearly all of them infants. One-third of all babies born in Paris in the 1770s were immediately abandoned to foundling homes. There appears to have been no differentiation by sex in the numbers of children sent to foundling hospitals. Many of the children were the offspring of single women, the result of the illegitimacy explosion of the second half of the eighteenth century. But fully one-third of all the foundlings were abandoned by married couples too poor to feed another child.12

At their best, foundling homes were a good example of Christian charity and social concern in an age of great poverty and inequality. They provided the rudiments of an education and sought to place the children in apprenticeship or domestic service once they reached an appropriate age. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau defended his decision to place his five illegitimate children in a foundling home — despite their mother’s opposition — on the grounds of “poverty and misfortune.” He also claimed that the hospital would shield them from the stigma of illegitimacy and provide a home that was “better, or at least more secure, than what [he] would have been able to provide.”13

Yet the foundling home was no panacea. Even in the best of these homes, 50 percent of the babies normally died within a year. In the worst, fully 90 percent did not survive, falling victim to infectious disease, malnutrition, and neglect.14 None of Rousseau’s children are known to have survived.