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| Sin and the Single Mother - The Guardian |
Back to Rome (and Greece)
This is going way back, but it serves to illustrate how the civilizations we consider the basis for our own were far from perfect role-models sometimes. The main method of dealing with unwanted children in ancient cultures was infant exposure. It was a widespread practice in antiquity to take the baby outside and leave them there exposed to the elements. Sometimes they'd get picked up and cared for by someone who wanted a baby or slavers who were willing to take them on as a future investment, etc. Most of the time they died. Husbands could decide then whether they were keeping a baby or not. The decision was usually purely pragmatic in the sense that he would decide that there wasn't room in the house for another mouth to feed, or he didn't want to pay the dowry for another girl. There are multiple references to infant exposure both in the historical texts and the mythology of ancient cultures, tales of heroes left on the side of a mountain at birth by their fathers. Oedipus was one example of a future hero put out to die.
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| Jean-Pierre Saint Ours - Selection of Children In Sparta |
There were methods even then of practicing birth control and herbal concoctions which would induce a miscarriage. The ancients were no strangers to those ideas either. In Rome they relied on a kind of giant fennel seed shaped like a Valentine's heart called "sylphium" for birth control. There was only one place where it grew, where Libya is now. Within a hundred years Roman demand for the herb wiped it out. They didn't just use it for birth control, they used it for other things like treating illness and flavoring food, because after all it was a relative of fennel. Mostly it was associated with birth control.
Middle Ages
After the fall of Rome the world they had once ruled over fell apart into tribes and kingdoms again and people went back to simple peasant ways. Christianity at this point was still mostly an eastern religion, but it had made it as far as Constantinople in the Byzantine court and was rapidly spreading westward from about the 4th century CE. The religion wasn't in its present form then. It wasn't even what could be called Catholicism until about the 6th or 7th centuries. In the 8th and 9th centuries the vikings came and spread out and places reverted to paganism. Either way the church hadn't really organized their teachings into anything like what they are today. Priests in the early church were allowed to get married and have children, but they hadn't actually decided yet what constituted marriage in any case. People went on living their lives and forming relationships and having kids. The church didn't really have a stance on it yet and the concept of bastardy hadn't been codified yet.
There was no shame in being an illegitimate child because there was no such thing at the time. Children basically belonged to their mothers, since that was all the parentage that could be proved. For the largest part of human history, motherhood was a fact and fatherhood was at best an educated opinion. William the Conqueror was a bastard both in fact and in behavior, but only because by that time the church had gotten around to wagging its finger at sex outside of marriage. They made a lot of their money from weddings and baptisms after all. That was the 11th century. By the 13th century the church had decided that priests could no longer be married and have families and hauled all of the wives off to convents and sent the children to the four winds, illegitimate now. This was because wealthy priests had been leaving their money to their children and the church wanted it. Bear in mind that a lot of the priests then were younger sons of the nobility and had some money of their own.
Bastardy
So illegitimacy wasn't really a thing for a long time. Nobody cared, even when the nobility had children outside of marriage. It wasn't until about the 12th century that the concept of bastardy had any weight and even then it was mainly applied to the nobility and used for political maneuvering, like denying someone an inheritance or succession. It didn't seem to be considered a huge problem among the peasantry until around 1560 when the illegitimacy rate dropped dramatically with the coming of Protestantism. The Catholic church had forbidden it, but the Protestant movement enforced it better by insisting that their members police each other's sexual behavior.
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| William I of England, Famous Bastard |
It took about another 200 years for those constraints to loosen and illegitimacy to boom again around the same time the Enlightenment started rejecting religious morality. Between 1750 and 1870 the rate of illegitimacy in most cities was around 20%, but in places like Austria it could be as high as 50 or 60%. In the span of the Industrial Revolution illegitimacy could be said to skyrocket. It carried a stigma, but that didn't stop people from doing what people do. Also they were now living in cities and there was more anonymity than there had been in a village. The former social contract had largely fallen apart and continued to do so into the 19th century where we see from the works of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy that people lived in abject poverty and tended to have a lot of children both within and outside of marriage.
Unwanted
In England in the 1740's a sea captain by the name of Thomas Coram built a "Foundling Hospital" in London because he was distressed at the number of unwanted children being left on doorsteps, most often on the doorstep of the church because through the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that was what happened to them. The baby would be left on the church steps and the parish would advertise anything they had which might lead to identifying the parents before they took them in and put them in the monastery or convent to be raised. The other option was that they ended up with people called "baby farmers" who would take the baby and the money and then smother the baby. Babies died all of the time in those days, so even when it happened a lot there weren't too many questions asked. It wasn't just babies that died all of the time. Parents died too, leaving behind orphans with nobody to take care of them. It was a hard world to bring a child into. It was also the beginning of "jobs" in the sense that we think of them today. Before the industrial revolution people were bound to the lord whose estate their village belonged to. They didn't have set hours or pay or an employer. Now they had employers who had no sympathy for unwed mothers and would fire them for becoming pregnant and/or being immoral. This led to a lot of working women hiding their pregnancies and abandoning the baby.
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| Thomas Coram |
So the foundling's hospital came into being as one of the first forms of orphanage. Coram's vision was a very progressive one for the time, but it was in no way equipped to address a problem that big. He wanted to provide the abandoned infants with a better life and turn them into productive adults. Unfortunately the original idea of providing orphans with the tools to go into life with went by the wayside and the institutions became warehouses for unwanted children. In 1756 Parliament decreed that foundlings should be received and that funds would be made available to care for them. Now it was a business, and since feeding and clothing orphans cost money the orphanages made sure they only provided the bare minimum. After all, they were only orphans and there were too many of them. If they died, nobody would miss them. If they were abused, there was nobody to stop it from happening. Besides, they were the product of fornication and immorality and a burden on society, and so they were disposable in the eyes of society back then. They should just consider themselves lucky anybody was giving them anything.
Modern Era
In this period it was also very common for unwanted babies to die conveniently of crib death or be listed as stillbirths, so much so that the authorities had to legislate against it as infanticide in England because it was happening too often in the Victorian period. There was no access to abortion and so women who found themselves in a difficult position had to wait until the baby was born until they could do anything about it. For better or for worse, there has never been a way to force a woman to become a mother when she does not want to be one. Babies were born at home in those days and it was easier to hide a pregnancy, especially when a woman lived alone. As far as anybody could say, the baby was born dead or died shortly after being born. On a still darker note, there was a trend in the 18th century for suicidal people to murder a child in order to go to heaven. The idea was that since children were innocent they would automatically go to heaven upon death. The murderer would avoid going to hell because they would be hanged for the crime, but it gave them a chance to make confession before they were hanged, thus allowing them to go to heaven too. It was some pretty messed up religious rules-lawyering, all because people were afraid of going to hell for killing themselves.
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| Children at Crumpsall Workhouse |
The orphanage system was growing as well. In a 20 year period between 1830 and 1850, 56 new orphanages were opened in the United States alone, if that gives any idea of the scale of the problem at the time. In the same period the workhouse system and demonization of poverty was growing as the Protestant work ethic and capitalism took their toll on society. People who were poor but still strong enough to work were sent to the workhouse where they would be fed and housed and clothed, but they would be put to work and their children would be taken away (and often put to work as well), because clearly they couldn't take care of them properly. Many families were broken up this way between around 1830 and the beginning of the 20th century. Workhouses were the original template for the "for-profit" prison system we have now in many ways. The philosophy was "Them as works, eats". If you wanted to eat, you had to work and that was that. The workhouses profited from the labor of the inmates. They also served as retirement homes for people who were too old to work. Famously, Charlie Chaplin spent time as a child at a workhouse when his single mother was ill and unable to work. They were also institutions by which the rich could control the poor, because once people are dependent on charity they become more easily coerced into shutting their mouths and doing what they're told or risk losing access to "help".
Religious Institutions
Most of the children placed in orphanages did not go on to be adopted or reunited with their parents. They might be taught a trade or not. Between the 1840's and 1870's about a third of the orphans were placed as indentured servants. Even if they still had a parent (say, in the workhouse for example) and that parent objected, once the child was put in an orphanage the parent no longer had any say in what happened to them. In the early 1900's the "baby train" movement started and many of the children on the streets or in orphanages were put on a train and shipped west to be indentured to farmers in the newly opened American Midwest. They'd be lined up on rural train platforms and the farmers would go down the line checking their teeth and looking for signs of things like tuberculosis before they picked one out and took them home. Babies were preferred by some, and since religious organizations ran most orphanages and adoption services, they used the system to place poor children with "good" families, which is to say religious ones in good standing. A lot of adoption was closed back then in the sense that all connection to the birth parents was cut off and if the child was young enough they were simply never told that they were adopted. The ones who were older, however, understood what was happening and very often they would run away as soon as nobody was watching them, because they'd been shipped into the middle of nowhere to be put to work and beaten or sexually abused.
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| Orphan Train Flyer |
In the meantime, Catholic and Protestant denominations had taken over the orphanage system and adoption system as a form of social engineering in their favor. They had manufactured the stigma surrounding giving birth out of wedlock and then they exploited it. When unmarried women and girls got pregnant, they'd go to a "lying-in" hospital run by a religious order to have their baby. The family would tell everyone that they'd gone to visit an aunt in another state or something and she might come back with nobody knowing. Or if she was Catholic she might not come back at all, because she'd given birth and been put in a Magdalene House. That was what happened to "fallen women". They would be put to work doing laundry under the watchful eye of the nuns. The babies were taken and put up for sale adoption. The last Magdalene house in Ireland closed in 1996, but they'd been in decline since the 60's. In the intervening years the church pressured unwed mothers who came into their hospitals to give birth into giving up their babies for adoption. Sometimes they wouldn't even let the mother see her baby after it was born. Sometimes they told her the baby had died and brought a dead baby they kept in cold storage to her to reinforce the lie. God only knows how many babies the religious organizations took from their mothers and placed, for a generous donation, with childless couples that the church approved of. Many hundreds of thousands, going by the recent revelations in different places of them stealing babies and selling them. And they had the sanction of the state behind them in these places. The law was on their side.
Foster System
Around 1890 the US decided that if they could not eradicate the indigenous people they would take them from their parents and raise them to be as close to white people as they could make them. This was the dawn of an organized eugenics movement and the thought was "kill the Indian but save the man". They started Indian boarding schools in America and Canada. Children were taken from their parents and their culture and given Christian names and forbidden from speaking their native language. They were beaten and starved and sometimes killed. Sexual abuse in these institutions was widespread. The Catholic church also used Indian reservations as a convenient dumping ground for disgraced priests, which continued into the present day.
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| Native American Children at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania ca. 1900 |
In 1909 the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, convened the first White House Conference on Children and stated that when possible, children should be placed with foster parents or adopted instead of being placed collectively in orphanages. In essence it turned into more baby farming in which people took on foster children for the check they got to support those children and then neglected and abused the children. Since there were always more children than foster parents, the authorities were somewhat lax in investigating any reports of neglect or abuse, because they needed the foster home more than they needed foster kids. They were never going to run out of unwanted children, after all. The agenda of social control never left the scene either. With the advent of eugenics the state could declare poor parents "unfit" and take their children away into care. Rather than do something about the circumstances of the family to allow them to stay together, the state and church-run organizations used the law as a stick to beat them over the head with. Stay in line and do what you're told or we'll throw you in jail and/or take away your children.
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| Florida Boys School Dining Hall |
Since there weren't enough foster homes, the states opened up group homes based on the orphanage/Indian school template. Now instead of just Native American children they took poor white children and black children too. There was an infamous "boys school" in Florida where they would periodically beat the children to death and bury them in an unmarked grave. That happened a lot throughout the period of orphanages and group homes. Since the organizations which volunteered to run these places were often religious, there was also a lot of religious abuse and indoctrination rolled in with the physical and sexual abuse. Even now this system remains in place in America, only now they're called "residential treatment centers" euphemistically and some token effort is made to provide mental health support and rehabilitation.
End Result
The end result of all of this is a massive attachment problem in America among poor families. They have sustained intergenerational damage to the family structure because the religious and temporal authorities decided they had to break up the family "for the good of the children". What happened to the children? By and large they went on to have terrible lives. The prognosis for a child who grew up in the foster system is not pretty. They have unhappy, dysfunctional relationships. They don't know how to parent, never having had any themselves. They turn to crime and drugs and end up in prison or resorting to prostitution to survive. They end up homeless and mentally ill. They commit suicide. They inflict their own attachment trauma on any kids they end up having. There are exceptions, but they're rare. About 10% of former foster kids end up going to university and of that 10% only 3% end up staying and getting a degree. It has a serious negative impact on any future they might have had if they had been allowed to stay with their families and the family situation had been improved.
As for my own personal knowledge of the system, I am a third generation foster child. My grandmother was the first, and she came west with the orphan train. Her son, my father, was abandoned into the foster system when she married because he was illegitimate. He in turn went on to start two families and abandon four children, two of which ended up with no mother and went into foster care. I aged out of the foster system at 18 and was immediately made homeless, because support for foster children stops as soon as they reach legal adulthood. After much struggle, I went on to work in a group home and see things from the staff side of it. It's just a terrible system all around. Thankfully there are fewer unwanted children because of women's access to birth control and abortion. Fewer children are brought into the world unwanted, only to suffer for a lifetime, often a shorter one than they would have had if they had been planned for and cared about. It is better for society not to make women have children they can't support and do not want.
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