In many German towns, a number of the institutions for the care of infants, and also the offices for the registration of births, distribute printed instructions regarding the care of infants, with especial reference to the matter of infant-feeding. The principle of these attempts is sound, but unfortunately many such leaflets are rather long-winded, and consequently remain unread.
It has been suggested that every woman entering upon marriage should have to display a knowledge of the elements of the hygiene of infant life, and more especially of the principles of infant-feeding; or else that the duty should be imposed upon women of acquiring the requisite knowledge within six months after marriage—by attendance at one of a number of schools to be founded with this end in view. The idea of this proposal is sound, but it is one which it is hardly possible to put into practice precisely in the form here stated.
Radical Solution of the Problem.—It is one of the most important aims of child-protection that during the first year of life the infant should be nourished at the maternal breast. Every possible effort must be made to secure that the infant should not be separated from its mother; and if separation from the mother is unavoidable, that the child should not be hand-fed, but suckled by a wet-nurse. Finally, when artificial feeding of the infant is inevitable, it is the aim of child-protection to secure that the technique of this feeding should be the best possible.
Two of the institutions of modern civil law are of such a nature as to favour wet-nursing and hand-feeding, and to hinder the attainment of the primary aims of child-protection. The first of these is that, within limits, the parents are free to determine how their child shall be brought up; so that, for instance, the mother is free to entrust her child to a wet-nurse, or even to have it brought up by hand. Hence the reform of these matters must begin with legislation securing that the legal position of legitimate and of illegitimate children shall be identical; and, secondly, imposing it upon all mothers as a legal obligation to suckle their own children when they are physically competent to do so.
The last-named measure is by some considered too radical, on the ground that its enforcement would infringe the sacred principle of the freedom of contract, and would violate the sanctity of family life. But these are merely empty phrases; and such considerations cannot for a moment counterbalance the urgent need for the proper protection of infant life. Even to-day, it is an accepted legal principle that in the case of contracts involving the personal service of the contracting parties within the limits of family life, the contract cannot be fulfilled by proxy. Thus, in the matter of the nourishment of an infant during the first months of life—that is to say, in respect of the performance of an act which is merely the continuation and the sequel of the physiological state brought into being by sexual intercourse and by pregnancy, the demand that no substitution be allowed, that lactation by proxy be prohibited, is a logical application of existing and accepted legal principles. In the sphere of family life, the principle of the freedom of contract finds even to-day no more than a restricted application; and with the disappearance of the economic order based upon free competition, the principle of the freedom of contract is destined altogether to disappear. Beyond question, the suggested reform would involve a very serious limitation of personal liberty. But the limitation would be no greater than those that are imposed in most modern States by various ordinances affecting the right of the individual to the free disposal of his own body—for instance, compulsory military service, compulsory vaccination, and compulsory removal to a hospital for infectious diseases. The proposed reform would knit closer the bonds between mother and child, and it would curtail the love of personal luxury and the pleasure-seeking of the women of the well-to-do classes. The legal measure here suggested was known to the old Prussian law, and to this law alone. It does not appear in any legal code of to-day. The two reasons that prevent its immediate adoption by any modern State are these: in the first place, it would affect the women of the upper classes much more than those of the lower, and would expose the former in especial to punishment; in the second place, a necessary corollary of any such law would be the provision for women of the lower classes of a suitable allowance for maintenance during the period of lactation.
[CHAPTER III]
THE CARE OF FOUNDLINGS, WET-NURSING, AND BABY-FARMING
Terminology.—In this work, when we speak of “the care of foundlings,” the term is used throughout in the widest signification, to denote the general care of the children boarded out, or otherwise placed in external care by the Poor Law Boards or other administrative instruments of poor-relief. Thus we do not refer to the care of all abandoned children, nor even to the care of all foundlings, but merely to the care of children permanently and completely abandoned by their relatives. It is necessary to lay this great stress upon the accurate definition of the term, for the reason that in Germany and in England the systems by which the community undertakes the care of foundlings is fiercely attacked; but the opponents of the institution are attacking something very different from what many of them imagine. To-day the care of abandoned children, and institutions for the care of these children, are altogether different from the foundling hospitals of former times; abandoned children are cared for by the community, not only in countries in which foundling hospitals exist, but also in Germany and England, for in these latter countries, the so-called Germanic system for the care of abandoned children, though there not spoken of as “care for foundlings,” amounts to the same thing.
History of the Care of Foundlings.—For two reasons it is necessary that we should deal with the history of the care of foundlings. In the first place, it is a branch of child-protection which is rightly considered to be of great importance, and yet in regard to this branch the most erroneous views prevail alike among laymen and non-laymen. In the second place, the care of foundlings to-day cannot possibly be understood by those who know nothing of the history of the institution. Even during the time at which infanticide and the exposing of children were still legally permissible among the Romans, these practices were condemned by public opinion, especially when the excuse of great poverty was lacking, and they were regarded as a misuse of parental authority. This applies even more to infanticide than to the exposing of children; for in the case of the latter, it was always possible that the child would be rescued and brought up by a third person. The Church naturally regarded both infanticide and the exposing of children as immoral and sinful. But what could the Church do to prevent infanticide? Infanticide was largely a result of the fact that the Church and public opinion strongly condemned illegitimate sexual relationships; in actual fact, infanticide was usually the act of an unmarried mother. The only course open to the Church, if it wished to prevent infanticide, was to tolerate the exposure of children, and to take steps to ensure that the children thus exposed should not perish. The Church permitted the lesser evil in order to prevent the greater. According to some authorities, the priests even publicly exhorted fallen women to expose their children at the church doors. In many churches, marble basins were placed, in which children could be left. In many communities, it was the duty of the verger to take first charge of exposed children. Thus, the exposing of children on these lines became transformed into a kind of legitimate transference to another of the duty of maintaining a child. To expose a child in any other way was a punishable offence. Since those children that survived had to be brought up, the Church made provision for this also. Gradually institutions were founded, to which children were brought secretly, where they were received without restriction as to number, and where they were brought up. The institution of the turn-table dates from about the year 1200, and for many centuries thereafter was the general method for the secret reception of the children. The turn-table is a box, one side of which is left open, fixed in the outer wall of the foundling hospital, and rotating upon a vertical axis. Anyone wishing to leave a child at the institution has merely to pass the child through the opening on to the turn-table, and then to ring the bell adjacent to the turn-table. Someone within the institution thereupon rotates the table to receive the child, while the person who brought it can go away unseen.