The Bitter Harvest of Victorian Baby Farms
Foster care fronting as murder for hire
“Highly respectable married couple wish to adopt child. Good country home. Premium required, very small.”— Newspaper ad placed by convicted British “baby farmer” Amelia Dyer
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One thing was clear to me from the first time I understood that I could get pregnant. I would do everything in my power to prevent it until I was ready. Lucky for me, the pill was available, effective, and accessible. I never once had an “OMG” moment during my entire fertile period. When I was married and ready, I went off the pill and it wasn’t long before a baby boy was was mine to love, instruct, and subject to my benevolent ignorance.
I suspect that the grand plan of life forces parents to prove their worth without instructions or face the consequences. Unfortunately, not everyone who finds themselves “in the family way” is equipped to step up to the plate.
Imagine finding yourself inconveniently pregnant in Victorian England. Whatever choices were available, they were limited and almost certainly not yours. It was a man’s world
Regardless of your status, your hand would be forced by whoever had control over you, usually a man, be he husband, father, churchwarden, or pimp. Even if your family had ample resources to care for your child, the taint of scandal was so abhorrent to the upper classes at that time that they would go to great lengths to avoid the merest hint of it. After all, for young ladies of quality, it was critical to maintain the appearance of virginity to command top dollar at the marriage mart.
Abortions were not only dangerous but challenging to obtain. Even if the procedure was available, most women of the time feared that such an act would condemn them to eternal damnation, a strong deterrent indeed.
Desperate mothers abound in fiction
I read a lot of historical detective fiction. The genre's best authors do exhaustive research and often know the eras they depict better than many university professors. (Of course, someareuniversity professors since writing alone rarely pays the bills.)
One of my favorite historical novelists is C.S. Harris, who writes the Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mystery series. In What Cannot Be Said, Harris includes a chilling subplot about "baby farmers” which piqued my interest and led me down the old research rabbit hole. The practice involved transferring infants from their families to foster parents who offered to raise them for a fee.
Babies whose mothers died in poor houses, the offspring of actors and sex workers, and those born to upper-class unmarried girls were all likely baby farm candidates. Such cases are common in fiction, from Oliver Twist to Gone with the Wind.
A more recent example is Lady Edith of television’s Downton Abbey, whose baby Marigold is born out of wedlock. A nearby farm couple raises the child in a bucolic setting while Edith provides financial support from afar, harboring hopes of one day being reunited. In her case, there’s a happy ending. Sadly, in real life, the outcome was usually quite different.
The truth behind the fantasy
The business of the baby farmer was not to foster healthy, happy members of society. It was to eliminate the costly and troublesome problem of unwanted children. They frequently did this by any means necessary.
Few of those unfortunate enough to find their way into the hands of a baby farmer survived the experience. Most died either from deliberate neglect and lack of nourishment over time or by poisoning, suffocation, or strangulation at the hands of their foster parent, often within hours of the exchange. The infant mortality rate was so high at the time that deniability of wrongdoing was easy enough to claim, and the law had better things to do than investigate.
The more cagey baby farmers kept one or two children alive to avoid suspicion and to help convince prospective clients they were trustworthy. These "lucky" few had patrons providing ongoing payments for care, or the baby farmer was planning to sell them on when they were older. For instance, one might get a good return on the investment by selling older children to chimney sweeps and madams.
Evil exposed: baby killers brought to justice
The practice was more common than you might think. As Harris points out in the novel’s author's notes, "The term baby farm did not come into widespread use until the Victorian age, but the practice of farming babies out to women living in the country existed long before." She goes on to cite the 1768 satire "The Bastard Child, or a Feast for the Church-warden” in which it is joked that a character called Mother Careless dispenses with children in an astonishingly speedy fashion.
It was not until the late 1800s that the public became widely aware of what was going on, following the arrest, trial, and execution of Margaret Walters in 1870, who was believed to have killed at least 19 children, and Amelia "The Ogress of Reading" Dyer in 1896. Dyer was suspected of killing as many as 400. However, only a handful of these were proven in court.
“The old baby farmer, the wretched Miss Dyer
At the Old Bailey her wages is paid.
In times long ago, we’d ‘a’ made a big fy-er
And roasted so nicely that wicked old jade.”(Popular ballad referenced in Lionel Rose’s 1986 book Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800–1939.)
The baby farm industry still exists, with a twist
Public outcry surrounding such cases in Britain led to the passage of the Infant Life Protection Act in 1872 and the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1884. Dorothy L. Haller's excellent paper "Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England provides a deep dive into the subject.
Human trafficking and the exploitation, abuse, and murder for profit of women and children in desperate situations continue to this day, not only in Great Britain but around the world. Modern baby farms or "factories," such as those recently exposed in Nigeria, operate in reverse to those of the Victorian era.
Instead of demanding a fee to foster a child, factory farmers offer free care to expectant mothers and a fee to surrender their children. They then sell babies to adoptive parents or human traffickers for hundreds or thousands of dollars. These criminals continue to get away with these despicable acts because, just as in Victorian England, it’s all too easy for the rest of the world to look away.
Canada, as part of the British Empire, followed a similar legal trajectory to dealing with it, though it continued off and on into the 20th century.
Alas, once it became illegal to "farm" babies, the unscrupulous turned to other victims who could not speak out. The modern "puppy mills" owe much in design and purpose to the baby farms.
This was such an important piece!