No sooner begun than done: Baby-farming and Bastardy

It's August of 1834 and Whig reform is in the air in Britain. This time, that reform is in regard to the poor and surprisingly perhaps, little discussion seems to occur before the act of the day passes into law.

That act, of course, is the Poor Law Amendment Act which effectively changed the poor laws as they had been for years.

But that isn't what this is about, not really. This is about a very small part of that act and the situation that arose in England as a result. When the PLAA passed, it was with what is commonly referred to as the Bastardy Clause tacked onto it.

That Bastardy Clause aimed to restore morality to the female population by absolving males of any responsibility to children born out of wedlock. To put it quite simply, if you were female and got pregnant outside of wedlock, you were screwed.

To add insult to injury, not only did the father not have to help, but you were incapable of seeking relief under the poor laws for yourself or for your child. You were considered immoral and that was the end of it so far as the law was concerned.

In reality, of course, it wasn't that simple. Women had to care for the children some way and so comes baby farming. With baby farming, individuals would sell their children, often illegitimate, to women, who often claimed, with the assistance of advertisements, to want to nurse or adopt the child for a specific amount paid weekly or in one lump sum.

The mother would meet up with one of these women in a public place and hand her child, and the payment, over. Whether most knew what was really happening to those children, I don't know. It's certainly easier to hope they were simply ignorant as well as desperate instead of truly aware of what they were doing. In reality, what may have sounded like a good deal was often actually quite horrible.

Many of the women that would take the children would either kill them outright or slowly starve them to death, retaining the payments from the mother. They knew, of course, that the more room they had, the better off they were. If they took a payment from a woman and killed the child, they would then have room for another child... and another payment. The older children that were taken this way were often worse off than the youngest. Their torment could be drawn out for months at a time before they finally succumbed to the abuse and neglect.

When an inquest was held about the deaths of these children, the women accused were, more often than not, let off. To admit there was a problem would have been to admit that perhaps the way the law had chosen to attempt to restore female morality wasn't the best and that that very law was to blame for the problem. Few wanted that.

It was infinitely easier to ignore that there was a problem than to do anything to stop the problem. So, for decades, what reform came in the laws was halfhearted at best and baby farming continued to thrive. Finally in 1897, thanks to the case of one of the most well known baby farmers, Amelia Dyer the year before, true reform began to occur.

Of course, the problem didn't really end there. Baby farming continued to some degree for several more years both in England and even here in the United States. But... the attention of the public was finally upon the atrocity that had been occurring for 60 or so years in England while they looked the other way and pretended it did not exist.

So... why am I sharing all of this now?

A few reasons actually.

First amongst them is that at the beginning of the year I researched the subject for a novel and when all the difficulty with my sister's pregnancy came up, it was placed on the back burner. Somewhere over the subsequent months, the research was lost and I recently started compiling all of it again. It's one of those subjects that never fails to bother me... which means it's, naturally, one of those subjects I find worthy of sharing.

Which leads me to reason number two. The history of baby farming is a subject little discussed and often even less known. We study history for years... but rarely ever touch upon the every day people that lived during those times and the realities that existed for them. It's important, every once in a while, to shake off the history tomes and remember those people and how the lives of those people have shaped the way we view things. Given that this month is national Family History Month... what better time to revisit the past and remember the children the world never got to know?

And if that isn't reason enough, remembering baby farming and the changes that were brought about to foster care and adoption as a result of this horror is particularly fitting this week. On October 11, 1870, Margaret Waters was charged with five counts of the murder of children through her baby farming venture and was hanged.

While Amelia Dyers' case brought about reform, the case of Margaret Waters was one of those that began to bring attention to the problem, both in England and here in the United States, and began setting the stage for that later reform. Indeed, thanks in part to her case; the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872 was brought to fruition. And while that act did not end the problem...it was a step further than England had gone since the creation of the problem 38 years before.

If anything good can be said to have come from such horrible beginnings... let it be the realization that sometimes the atrocities we accept in the name of morality are infinitely worse than the lack of "morality" itself. We hear a lot here about not making progress for the sake of progress. Sometimes, however, it’s prudent to remember that not all progress is made merely for the sake of progress. Sometimes progress is made because to do otherwise is the most unconscionable thing one can do.