Baby Farming: Setting the Record Straight on Certain Misperceptions

Wikipedia states that “Baby farming refers to the historical practice of accepting custody of an infant or child in exchange for payment in late-Victorian Era Britain and, less commonly, in Australia and the United States. If the infant was young, this usually included wet-nursing (breast-feeding by a woman not the mother). Some baby farmers ‘adopted’ children for lump-sum payments, while others cared for infants for periodic payments.” [“Baby Farming” page, Wikipedia]

Two aspects of this description are misleading: historical period and geographical distribution. The reason for the error of regional restriction is simply the fact that “Baby Farming” is the term coined in England that is used in the anglophone world. The chronological error results from the fact that the most widely known baby farmers, most particularly the serial baby-killer Amelia Dyer, date from late Victorian England.

The fact is that the practice was common throughout Europe, parts of Asia, Mexico. Further research might well make extensive additions to the list. Baby Farmers who have been prosecuted for serially murdering their charges are known as early as the 17^th century England (Abigail Hill, 1658; Mary Compton, 1673) and 18^th century in Portugal (Luiza de Jesus, 1772) and France (Louise Mabre, 1763) and as late as the 1940s in the United States (Georgia Tann; Edna Roseberry) although the term “baby farming” was not current or regionally idiomatic at these times.

The Forgotten Serial Killers lists around a hundred cases of Baby Farmers prosecuted for, or suspected of serial child murder. By overlooking the scale and breadth of the Baby Farming phenomenon we end up ignoring crimes of immense magnitude, leaving criminologists and other scholars in the dark regarding important data. The industrial-scale child-murders discovered in 1906 by Mr.and Mrs. Holmen in  Stockholm is a case in point.

Revelations concerning the “National Children’s Sanitorium” have just been announced after an investigation by the authorities, which has been going on for some weeks. It appears that the alleged sanitorium was simply a baby-farm on in immense scale and that wholesale murders of babies were committed.

Over a thousand babies over a period of three years were murdered there. The infamous American "child-rearing expert" and adoption-racket kidnapper and baby-seller, Georgia Tann of Memphis, may well have been even more prolific at baby-killing than the Swedish couple, though the term “Baby Farmer,” obsolete by the 1940s, has never been applied to her, let alone "serial killer" (except by the this author).

An extensive overview of the subject is to be found in the illustrated article “Death on the Baby Farm” by Robert St. Estephe. 

 

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