Baby farming

Baby farming is the historical practice of accepting custody of an infant or child in exchange for payment in late-Victorian Britain and, less commonly, in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

In late-Victorian Britain (and, less commonly, in Australia and the United States), baby farming was the practice of accepting custody of an infant or child in exchange for payment.

[2] Illegitimacy and its attendant social stigma were usually the impetus for a mother's decision to put her children "out to nurse" with a baby farmer, but baby farming also encompassed foster care and adoption in the period before they were regulated by British law in the mid 19th century.

[citation needed] An undercover investigation of baby-farming, reported in 1870 in a letter to The Times, concluded that "My conviction is that children are murdered in scores by these women, that adoption is only a fine phrase for slow or sudden death".

[8] Spurred by a series of articles that appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1867, the Parliament of the United Kingdom began[according to whom?]

London coroner Athelstan Braxton Hicks gave evidence in 1896 on the dangers of baby-farming to the Select Committee on Infant Life Protection Bill.

In the 1960s and 70s, thousands of West African children were privately fostered by white families in the UK in a phenomenon known as 'farming'.