>
>The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling
>history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing
>meaning of family.''
>Here in the SF/Oak/Berkeley area there were so many newborns found in
>dumpsters, or wrapped and left on the street, or died from abandonment
>that local hospitals instituted a `no questions asked'' policy so
>women could simply take their newborn baby to a hospital and leave
>them.
>
>CG
This is more a modern problem though. Boswell spends a lot of time showing that what we now generally translate as "exposure" and generally understand as leaving a child exposed to die was not what the ancient term "expositio" meant. The ancient and medieval connotation was placing a child outside the home, usually in a public place, where she would be noticed. Boswell says our conflation of exposure and infanticide is misplaced and that the great majority of abandoned children would be raised by someone else. That's what is referred to by the title of his book "The Kindness of Strangers", his translation of "aliena misericordia".
Reasons for abandonment included, quoting from the book: "desperation when (parents) were unable to support them....in shame, when they were unwilling to keep them because of their physical condition or ancestry (e.g., illegitimate or incestuous); in self-interest or the interest of another child, when inheritance or domestic resources would be compromised by another mouth; in hope, when they believed that someone of greater means or higher standing might find them and bring them up...; in resignation, when a child was of unwelcome gender or ominous auspices; or in callousness , if they simply could not be bothered with parenthood."
Boswell first got interested in this topic when he was working on something else and kept finding texts from theologians speaking against having sex with prostitutes because of the possibility of having sex with your own child. He also says that Christianity may have increased the rate of abandonment by insisting on sex as solely procreative and by providing humane modes of abandoning infants to churches and monasteries. But then when the practice of abandonment became increasingly institutionalized with foundling hospitals, the chances of adoption decreased when the kid disappeared behind the hospital walls and the death rate increased because kids got sick and died.