"BABY Farming": Infanticide for profit

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"BABY Farming": Infanticide for profit
Each historical era spawns its own peculiar types of crime, from piracy and slave trading to the modern age of "wilding" and computer "hackers." The occupation known as "baby farming" was a product of the Victorian era, when sex was equivalent to sin and illegitimate birth meant lifelong shame for mother and child alike. In that repressive atmosphere, the "baby farmer"—usually a woman—was prepared to help an unwed mother through her time of trial . . . but only for a price.
In most cases, the "farmer" provided room and board during a mother's confinement, allowing embarrassed families to tell the neighbors that their daughter had gone "to study abroad" or "stay with relatives." Facilities ranged from humble country cottages to the likes of LILA YOUNG's spacious Ideal Maternity Home, where hundreds of infants were born between 1925 and 1947. Unwed mothers went home with their reputations and consciences intact, secure in the knowledge that their babies would be placed in good homes through black-market adoptions.
It was a no-lose proposition for the "baby farmer," paid by those who left a child and once again by those who came to pick one up. If certain laws were broken in the process, it was all the better reason for increasing the adoption fees. Most unwed mothers and adoptive parents doubtless viewed the "baby farmer's" occupation as a valuable public service, never mind prevailing law.
It was not uncommon, however, for "baby farmers" to repeatedly use criminal negligence or deliberate murder as a shortcut to profit in the maternity game. Over time there have been several headline cases, and not even the United States has been exempt from lethal "baby farming," illustrated by the New York City case of 14 infant murders reported in 1915. That case remains unsolved, but other practitioners were brought to book for their crimes in England and Canada, with one case broken as recently as the late 1940s.