In an old-style peasant village, if she gets pregnant everyone has a pretty good idea who dad is, and the couple are pressured to marry. Few single moms, limited pre-engagement sex because everyone knows that pregnancy=marriage, sexual relations start with engagement, and about 1/3 of all brides are pregnant.

When those social controls broke down, there were a lot more absconding dads and seductions, to the point where some estimates have about 1 birth in 3 being out of wedlock. “Victorian” morality was in part an attempt to create new social pressures that would put an end to the crisis of bastardry. It worked, for a while.

So the turn of the 18th century saw a vast rise in foundlings hospitals (dying places), in baby farms (dying places), and in wet nurses including killing nurses (if you pay her when she takes on the baby, not when the baby is healthily weaned, she has an incentive to kill the child.)

In any case, I would not blame the theocrats for this one. Save the blame for folks like Anthony Comstock who criminalized birth control.

Seems to me that a certain infamous professor at an Ivy League university today advocates not only abortion on demand but also infantacide up to age three years if a kid turns out not to be quite perfect, and I believe he is not only a Leftist, politically, but also an atheist.

In eighteenth-century Europe, anti-wet nursing literature expressed concern for the well-being of the babies being farmed out, but not much consideration for the offspring of the wet nurses who were often neglected or even permitted to die to make way for a paying consumer

An entry in Britannica (I believe on European history) briefly refers to a case of a sewer drain in France, which was cleaned out and revealed a number of baby skeletons. I think it was supposed to have happened in the 1700s, but I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the 20th century.

Also, this reminds me of a joke –
Poland, a few centuries ago, and a small infant is abandoned on the doorstep of a poor nunnery. The nuns don’t have the wherewithal to care for the child themselves, but they’re treating a town priest with a rich living for constipation. Reasoning he must be a little naive about these things, they tell him that, miracle of miracles, he’s pregnant, drug him unconscious, and the next day present him with a bouncing baby boy.

So, the priest goes back to his living and brings the boy with him as his adopted son. Everyone naturally assumes he’s the priest’s bastard, and the boy, of course, grows up calling him ‘Father.’

Come the boy’s sixteenth birthday, the priest calls him into his office.

‘My son, I have something important to tell you.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘That’s just it, son. I’m not your father. I’m your mother. The Bishop of Krakow was your father.’

Well george, to cop an old Woody Allen line: They usually travel in pairs.

The practice of leaving infanticide via exposure was fairly common in pre-Islamic Arabia. Enough so that a prohibition against it is found in the Qur’an (nb-only about 5% of the Qur’anic text is legislative.)

Interestingly (well, for me at any rate), the practice of wet-nursing in ancient Arabia was quite common. Particularly by urban people as it was considered desireable for one’s child to grow up among the Bedouin as they were regarded as speaking a purer form of Arabic. This practice became codified in Islamic law such that an infant having been breast fed by the same wet-nurse x number of times (I think it’s around 6) would regard the wet-nurse as his/her milk-mother. Hence, all relevant Islamic family law would apply (prohibition on marriage, permissibility of not covering up, etc., – not so sure though about inheritance law, I think not since that is Qur’anic but I’d have to check.)

I did not think or say the babies would be disposed of. The idea is to give the child up for adoption no questions asked. The main point is anonymity.

And then as now I believe some would have loved to keep their child.

There is a movie”The Magdalena Sisters” about an institution for “fallen” girls in Ireland, run by the Sisters even in late 70th 80th, it is heart wrenching.

To give up a child is just as horrible today as it was then.