Ebook Baby-Farming

There is a belief that an Act of Parliament already exists for the proper regulation of these people, the Infant Life Protection Act, 1872. Few Acts are more profoundly misunderstood. It is a pom pous introduction to next to nothing. Excluding all infant lives from its protection, except when two under a year old happen to be found together, it leaves to the farmer's mercies a hundred times as many as it even proposes to protect. Its main effect is to teach farmers how to escape its provisions and to conduct their business as they like. The man who would have any adequate notion of the nature and extent of English baby-farming, and of the baby sufferings, illnesses, and death produced by the misconduct practised in it, had better not resort to the history of the Infant Life Protection Act. The chief crime made by it, namely, Unlawfully neglect to register, cannot be committed by ninety-nine out of a hundred who take in babies for a living, and it is a crime which has, moreover, nothing to do with the horrible iniquities of the system.