448Chapter 23
percent in 1889). Much lower rates were found in re-
gions with early marriages (such as Serbia, which re-
ported 1.1 percent illegitimacy) or the strictest sexual
mores (such as Ireland, which reported 2.7 percent).
Conversely, where late marriages were the norm, ille-
gitimacy rose. A demographic study of rural Portugal
found that, in villages where landless peasants could
not marry until late in life, illegitimacy reached as high
as 73 percent of all births. As the data for Ireland and
Austria show, national religions were not the determin-
ing factor in illegitimate births.
Infanticide and the abandonment of newborn in-
fants (often the same thing) remained serious social
problems as they had been in the Old Regime. In
Britain, the law stated that infanticide must be treated
as murder, but it also said “it must be proved that the
entire body of the child has actually been born into the
world in a living state” before the child was legally alive
and the act was legally murder. Killing an infant as it
emerged from the womb thus received some legal pro-
tection, and it was a horrifying, but not uncommon, ur-
ban experience of mid-Victorian England to find dead
babies in the streets, in trash heaps, or in rivers. Aban-
donment was sufficiently common in Victorian England
that George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans)
could make it a central element of Adam Bede(1859) and
make the mother who left her child to die in the woods
(Hetty Sorrel) a sympathetic character.
In France, infanticide was so common that at least
one thousand women were indicted for it every year
from the 1840s to the 1880s; annual arrests did not fall
below five hundred until 1901. One study estimates
that the crime reached its nineteenth-century peak at
12 percent of all births in 1862–63. In the years
1817–20, the abandonment of babies at Paris hospitals
equaled one-third of the births recorded in the city, al-
though many of these infants were undoubtedly
brought to Paris from the countryside. The abandon-Illustration 23.4
Abortion.Abortion was both illegal
and widely practiced in the nineteenth
century. Although little reliable data exists,
hundreds of thousands of abortions clearly
were being performed with relatively few
trials taking place. As this turn-of-the-
century caricature bluntly suggests,
women knew where to find a local
“angel-maker.”