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Historical data on abortions are among the least reliable evidence confronting historians, but provocative records survive on this controversial subject. A study of abortion in France in the late 19th century concluded that approximately 250,000 abortions per year were performed there. It was illegal to perform or to obtain an abortion throughout those years, but only one hundred to two hundred French women were convicted of the crime each year. Physicians' records from small villages show varying local rates, from 3 percent to 18 percent of all pregnancies ending in abortion. In contrast, fully 40 percent of the working-class women interviewed in Berlin in 1913 admitted that they had at least one abortion; the entire group had terminated almost one-third of their pregnancies by abortions. The means of abortion that they reported were startling: One simply "jumped off chairs and stools." Another "sent for a [chemical] remedy that was advertised in the newspaper." And a third "poked around with a quill a little bit until blood came." Descriptions of similar means of aborting unwanted pregnancies occur in late nineteenth-century novels, such as Zola's grim portrayal of peasant life in France, The Land (1887). Such sources suggest that many abortions were performed by midwives. Despite the medical, legal, social, and religious obstacles, European women practiced birth control and abortion on a large enough scale during the 19th century to sharply lower European birthrates.

The increasing use of birth control did not mean that social problems associated with child birth, such as illegitimacy, abandonment, and infanticide, disappeared. Illegitimacy began to increase in the late 18th century and grew during the 19th century, until 8 percent of all European births in the 1880s were illegitimate. This pattern varied regionally, with the highest national averages being found in Germanic central Europe. Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Scandinavia had a combined illegitimate birthrate above 10 percent, with the highest figure being in Austria (14.9 percent in 1889). Much lower rates were found in regions with early marriages (such as Serbia, which reported 1.1 percent illegitimacy) or the strictest sexual mores (such as Ireland, which reported 2.7 percent). Conversely, where late marriages were the norm, illegitimacy rose. A demographic study of rural Portugal found that, in villages where landless peasants could not marry until late in life, illegitimacy reached as high as 73 percent of all births. As the data for Ireland and Austria show, national religions were not the determining factor in illegitimate births.

Infanticide and the abandonment of newborn infants (often the same thing) remained serious social problems as they had been in the Old Regime. In Britain, the law stated that infanticide must be treated as murder, but it also said "it must be proved that the entire body of the child has actually been born into the world in a living state" before the child was legally alive and the act was legally murder. Killing an infant as it emerged from the womb thus received some legal protection, and it was a horrifying, but not uncommon, urban experience of mid-Victorian England to find dead babies in the streets, in trash heaps, or in rivers. Abandonment was sufficiently common in Victorian England that George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) could make it a central element of Adam Bede (1859) and make the mother who left her child to die in the woods (Hetty Sorrel) a sympathetic character.

In France, infanticide was so common that at least one thousand women were indicted for it every year from the 1840s to the 1880s; annual arrests did not fall below five hundred until 1901. One study estimates that the crime reached its nineteenth-century peak at 12 percent of all births in 1862-63. In the years 1817-20, the abandonment of babies at Paris hospitals equaled one-third of the births recorded in the city, although many of these infants were undoubtedly brought to Paris from the countryside. The abandonment of babies at public institutions in France reached a recorded peak of 164,319 in 1833. Thus, abandonment of infanticide may have claimed 40 percent of all babies in some years.

Abandonment was most common in regions where effective contraception was not well known, especially in Eastern Europe. Catherine the Great had established foundling homes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but abandoned babies soon overflowed these institutions, which then became processing centers for shipping unwanted babies to the countryside. In the 1830s the foundling home of St. Petersburg had twenty-five thousand children on its rolls with five thousand being added each year; by the 1880s the home in St. Petersburg was receiving nine thousand abandoned newborns per year and the home in Moscow, seventeen thousand. The problem was most urgent for the large numbers of women who were domestic servants in the cities--25 percent of women in Moscow, 37 percent in St. Petersburg. Marriage was difficult for these women and economic survival virtually impossible if they lost their posts, as they would if they had a child. Children who reached the foundling homes suffered terribly: Between 75 percent and 90 percent of them died each year. Similar patterns existed in Western Europe, and critics were not totally wrong when they called foundling homes a system of "legalized infanticide." . . . 

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