Eight women in this archive did the same job. They took in other people's babies for a fee, and the babies died. The cases run from London in 1870 to New Jersey in the 1940s, across six countries, and none of these women knew each other. Seven were convicted. One was acquitted, and her case is the one that shows what the others were prosecuted for.
They were doing something the law allowed. Baby farming was an industry, and it existed because there was no other provision for a woman who had a child and no husband. There was no adoption system worth the name, no state support, and a level of disgrace that could end her employment and her family ties at once. What there was instead was a newspaper advertisement offering to take the child, usually for a single lump sum.
The lump sum is the mechanism. Margaret Waters took in infants in south London for a fee and dosed them with opiates until they starved. Once the payment is made in advance and there is no continuing income, a living child is a permanent cost and a dead one is not. That arithmetic is what the seven convictions here rest on.
Amelia Sach ran a lying-in home in Finchley that took in the babies of unmarried women for a fee and had them killed by Annie Walters. The two were hanged together at Holloway in 1903, the first executions carried out at that prison. Elisabeth Wiese took in unwanted infants for money in Hamburg and killed five children with morphine between 1902 and 1903, one of them her own grandson.
Dagmar Overbye took in unwanted infants in Copenhagen and killed at least nine by strangling, drowning or burning, and probably far more, her range in this roster runs to twenty-five. Hilda Nilsson took in infants for payment in Helsingborg and drowned them. Sarah Makin and her husband John took in infants for a fee in Sydney and buried them in the gardens of the houses they rented, which is how they were caught: a plumber found remains at a previous address.
Minnie Dean took in unwanted infants for payment in New Zealand and was hanged in 1895 for the murder of one of them. She is the only woman ever legally hanged in New Zealand.
Gladys Lila Young ran the most industrialised version, and hers is the case that ended in an acquittal. Her home took in unmarried women, delivered their children in secret for a fee, and then placed the babies for adoption for a further fee, largely with families in New Jersey and New York. In March 1936 she was charged with two counts of manslaughter over the January deaths of Eva Nieforth and her newborn child, alleged to have been caused by negligence and unsanitary conditions rather than by any deliberate act, and she was acquitted at a three-day trial that May. The upper figure attributed to the home is above a hundred, and none of it was ever tested in court.
Two things about this group are worth stating plainly.
The first is that the victim counts are almost all ranges, and unusually wide ones: one to nineteen, nine to twenty-five, two to over a hundred. That is not vagueness. An infant handed over privately by a woman with reason to keep the transaction quiet has no birth registration anyone will check, no relatives who will ask, and no one to report it missing. The same absence of a paper trail that made the business possible makes the count unknowable now.
The second is that these cases produced law. Britain's Infant Life Protection Acts followed the Waters case and the ones after it, requiring registration and inspection of anyone taking in children for payment. The practice did not end because the women in this archive were caught. It ended, slowly, because the reason it existed was legislated away.
That is the uncomfortable part. A large but uncountable number of infants died in these eight households, and every one of those children was handed over by a mother who had no better option available to her. The women in these entries were the option.