Infanticide became a “routine” practice in modern Europe. In some parts, such as rural Tuscany, the number of baby murders could have constituted up to a third of the total number of live births. “This was a crime that left neither aggrieved party seeking revenge,” says historian Gregory Hanlon.
This professor from Dalhousie University in Canada points out in his book Death Control in the West 1500–1800: Sex Ratios at Baptism in Italy, France and England that the violent deaths of newborns was much more widespread than previously thought.
“Western historians have relied almost exclusively on records of criminal trials in which single mothers or married women who had offspring not fathered by their husbands concealed their pregnancies and killed their newborns alone or with female accomplices. The mothers married infanticides may have been a hundred times as numerous,” says Hanlon.
To break the limits of existing studies, the Dalhousie professor and his team have focused on the sex ratio of babies who were baptized hours or days after birth. These records, for example, reveal striking spikes in the number of male baptisms after famines or pandemics.
Using church censuses drawn from dozens of parishes in Italy, France, and England, Gregory Hanlon shows similar patterns of infanticide in all cities and countries, for Catholics, Calvinists, and Anglicans alike. “In most cases, infanticide was a crime that could be overlooked and forgotten over time,” he notes.
His research suggests that in rural Tuscany, at the height of this practice, victims could have made up as much as a third of the total number of live births. In 17th-century Italy, for example, experts say parents seemed willing to sacrifice a child if they had twins, opting to keep only one of the newborns.
In the northern Italian city of Parma, researchers found that working-class parents preferred girls over boys. Another clear pattern of preference for females has been found after 1650 in the French city of Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
“Families with lower status wanted to marry off their daughters to, at the same time, improve their economic conditions and be able to make long-term plans for social growth,” says Dominic J. Rossi, a former student of Nalón and co-author of the study.
On the other hand, specialists have discovered sufficient evidence to show that upper-class parents in rural areas of Mézin (in the Aquitaine region, France) showed a clear preference for keeping newborn males alive.
The book sheds light on the many children whose existence was not recorded anywhere and whose deaths went unpunished. Nalón also draws attention to the lax punitive measures taken for crimes of infanticide and points out in a statement that “the courts operated against single mothers almost exclusively, but only if the newborn was deliberately killed. Simple abandonment was not a comparable crime “.
“Infanticide is a murder, of course, but people did not consider this murder to be a crime,” explains the historian, who assures that “most people could continue living with this circumstance as if it were just a fact unpleasant life.”
The roles of the state and the criminal justice system have also been examined by researchers, along with the realities of poverty and social class structures. The book also draws parallels between stories of infanticide and current discussions of reproductive rights. Hence, Gregory Nalón and his collaborators ask to consider this practice beyond a moralistic approach.
