A most noisome, painful and fatal disease

The Economist article about German baby hatches reminded me about what we used to do with those infantile economic liabilities, unwanted babies.

It’s hard to imagine, or for anti-contraception activists to grasp, but in the old days people controlled their family sizes by abandoning their children.

A baby hatch is a revolving door.  People (please read “mothers”) can leave newborns anonymously.  A parent puts the baby in the door and turns it.  A caregiver on the other side of the wall accepts the baby without ever seeing the mother.  The old trope about putting the baby in a basket on the steps of the church works the same way.

Babies left this way are called foundlings.  Not all of them illegitimate.  They're also the offspring of families unable to afford them.

I’m surprised to learn that Germany still has about 200 baby hatches, and that people use them.

I wish more people would read John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. In the days before contraception, parents had to abandon infants.  Can’t afford or can’t keep that baby?  Leave it at a monastery or a foundling hospital.  Maybe some kind couple will adopt it. More likely, someone will buy it to turn it into a pickpocket, prostitute or chimney sweep.

Monasteries were happy to take on unpaid workers.  They raised them to be monks.  They  balked at their role as family-of-last-resort only when the law required them to offer adolescent foundlings a choice about whether to take the orders.

Which is better: preventing that pregnancy from coming to term, or knowing that the baby will probably be turned into a three-year-old chimney sweep because he’s small enough to climb into the chimney if you prod him hard enough, and knowing that he’ll probably die of scrotal cancer before he’s old enough to procreate? 

Chimney sweep's cancer, also called soot wart, was the first occupational cancer, identified by Percival Pott in 1775. Pott wrote 

they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies, [sic] where they are bruised burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty they become ... liable to a most noisome, painful and fatal disease

due to the accumulation of coal tars under their uncircumcised foreskins.

Affluent countries now protect unwanted or unaffordable children, but you still see them in poorer countries.  Take, for example, Brazil’s meninos de rua, or “marginalized children,”  pre-pubescent pickpockets.  Nancy Scheper-Hughes andDaniel Hoffman wrote in 1994 

These street children do not so much "run away" or "choose the streets" as they are thrown out of homes where hunger, abuse, poverty and neglect make life under bridges and in bus station restrooms seem more "peaceful"

These Oliver Twists may not have been foundlings, but their mothers' inability to care for them marginalized them nonetheless.

 

A woman who can afford contraception sleeps easier knowing that she won’t have to abandon a baby to a solitary, nasty, brutish and short life.  Family planning is a technological great leap forward.