Infanticide
The current Lost Cousins newsletter has a piece about a Canadian professor who has researched Italian French and English birth/death parish registers and has concluded that the poor used infanticide as a means of birth control! His reasoning is that so many infants died. I find this hard to believe - yes, lots of infant deaths, but in my extended family, still plenty of survivors to make economic poverty inevitable.
Notably, my 6 x ggps had 19 children of whom only three survived to adulthood. The first six children all died in the space of three weeks of smallpox (unless the parents lied to the Vicar of course). Another 10 died at ages between 0-16 of unrecorded causes but I doubt they were murdered for eating too much, for instance.
My ancestors all had big families, most of whom survived to adulthood. I have never suspected infanticide, perhaps that makes me naive. I'm sure it must have happened occasionally in the general population but I feel that fear of god, if nothing else, would have made it quite rare and certainly not a widespread form of birth control.
I look forward to reading the Professor's book so that I can pick holes in it!
OC
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