Infant mortality : its causes and remedies.

Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Infant mortality : its causes and remedies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    parents or other natural guardians, but'in still larger measure to a cause which will shortly engage our attention, namely, the defective state of the law relating to offences against women and children. The difficulty experienced by the mothers of illegitimate chil- dren in finding employment by which they can earn enough to maintain their infants and themselves requires no proof from facts and figures. Of two girls, the one of unstained, the other of tarnished character, both willing and anxious to work, it is certain that ninety-nine persons out of every hundred will, most naturally, give the preference to the former; and the demand for the labour of women, so limited are the branches of industry in which it is employed, being insufficient to absorb the supply, those who have erred are almost necessarily driven by the pres- sure of want to rid themselves of children they cannot feed, by desertion or murder. Thus, that poverty^^ which, at the beginning of this investiga- tion, we recognised as one of the conditions of seduction, and therefore as a remote cause of infanticide, and excessive mortality among illegitimate children, reappears at this later stage, as the ' 1 In support of our belief that poverty is the almost invariable cause of the desertion'of infants hy their mothers, we will cite the last report of the Cumberland- street Home for Deserted Mothers and Infants. Speaking of the mothers who have gone forth to service from the institution, leaving their children in its charge, Miss Broughton, the author of the report, says:— They aU pay readily for them, and we have never—as it has sometimes been supposed we should—had an instance of a mother deserting her chDd. The italics are Miss Broughton's, not ours. A paper published by the Committee of the Homes of Hope, spealdng of the young mothers received by that society, says : — In almost every case they have turned out well. We are also authorised to quote from the letters of three ladies all possessing extensive knowledge on this painful subject, and each dwelling in a different part of England. Miss Nicholson, of Devonport, writes that she has known cases of mothers who were brought by desertion, contemptuous treatment, and starvation, to the verge of madness, if not to a condition of positive insanity, but who, having been rescued and helped, now manifest such love for their children as to undergo very painful sacrifices for their sakes. It would be impossible, without breach of confidence, to describe the extent to which, in regard to infanticide, some of these poor mothers were tempted. Mrs. Evans, of Stroud, states that there ia scarcely any infanticide in that neigh- bourhood, yet the women seldom affiliate their children, partly because such a proceed- ing, by embittering the man, destroys their chance of marriage, and partly because, the labour of women being in demand and well paid, they can support them themselves. Lastly, Mrs. Whitehead, writing from Rawtenstall, and refei-ring to the upper valley of the Irwell, says, No infanticide; work for women plentiful, their wages high. The connection between the two statements is obvious.