Desired Fertility and Number of Children Born Across Time and Space.

Economists have often argued that high fertility rates are mainly driven by women's demand for children (and not by family planning efforts) with low levels of unwanted fertility across countries (and hence with little room for family planning efforts to reduce population growth). We study the relationship between wanted fertility and number of children born in a panel of 200 country-years controlling for country fixed effects and global time trends. In general, we find a close relationship between wanted and actual fertility, with one desired child leading to one additional birth. However, our results also indicate that in the last 20 years, the level of unwanted births has stayed at 2 across African countries but has, on average, decreased from 1 to close to 0 in other developing countries. Hence, women in African countries are less able to translate child preferences into birth outcomes than women in other developing countries, and forces other than fertility demand have been important for previous fertility declines in many developing countries. Family planning efforts only partially explain the observed temporal and spatial differences in achieving desired fertility levels.

Children abandoned and taken back: children, women, and families in dire straits in Lyon in the nineteenth century.

Abandoning a child was no rare deed in European towns in the nineteenth century, mostly among single women in underprivileged environments. On the other hand, taking this same child back was more unusual. By analyzing the registers of the Lyon hospitals, it is possible to determine the percentage of children taken back by their mothers, how this was actually achieved, and to examine the family status of the mothers at the time of both events. Both of these acts -- abandoning a child and then taking it back -- can be put back in their context in these women's lives, for instance, by looking into the length of time separating the two procedures. To finish with, it appears that the 'Hospices civils de Lyon' encouraged mothers to take the children back and generally had a conciliatory attitude toward them, supposedly in the children's interest.

Dead infants, cruel mothers, and heroic popes: the visual rhetoric of foundling care at the hospital of Santo Spirito, Rome.

The fresco cycle painted at the behest of Pope Sixtus IV in the late 1470s in the main ward of the hospital of Santo Spirito in rome comprises an extended pictorial biography of Sixtus, prefaced by scenes representing the legendary foundation of the hospital by his predecessor Innocent III. The legend, which tells how Innocent established Santo Spirito as a foundling hospital in response to the discovery of victims of infanticide in the Tiber River, positions the pope as the savior of the city's unwanted children. This article elucidates how the construction and renovation of the hospital is presented in the cycle as a generative product of papal will, with the care of foundlings situated as an integral part of the image of the pope as both Father of the Church and restorer of past glory to the city of Rome. While the frescoes engage with both widespread conventions for representing infanticide and commonplace notions of the social value of caring for abandoned children, I demonstrate that the ideologically potent visual rhetoric of foundling care was also flexible, and could be adapted to meet the specific needs of a particular institutional and patronal context.

The other woman and her child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain.

This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed 'divorcing society' and the decline of family life in modern Britain.

Rejeitados, jamais / Rejected, never

Faz uma abordagem sobre o abandono de crianças , que na Colônia era visto como uma alternativa mais aceitável do que o aborto ou o infanticídio. O acolhimento de crianças enjeitadas começou no Ocidente medieval em estabelecimentos que utilizavam uma 'roda'-uma espécie de portinhola giratória onde o bebê era deixado, para ficar sob os cuidados de uma instituição de caridade, sem que sua procedência pudesse ser identificada pelos internos-, ajudando a manter o anonimato da mãe e as chances de sobrevivência do bebê. Esse modelo de acolhimento de recé´-nascidos ganhou inúmeros adeptos por toda a Europa, principalmente a católica, a partir do século XVI. (AU)

Abandoned in Brussels, delivered in Paris: long-distance transports of unwanted children in the eighteenth century.

The study uses examinations and other documents produced in the course of a large-scale investigation undertaken by the central authorities of the Austrian Netherlands in the 1760s on the transportation of about thirty children from Brussels to the Parisian foundling house by a Brussels shoemaker and his wife. It combines the rich archival evidence with sparse indications in the literature to demonstrate that long-distance transports of abandoned children were a common but historiographically neglected by-product of the ambiguities of foundling policies in eighteenth-century Europe and provides insight into the functioning of the associated networks and the motives of parents, doctors, midwives, transporters, and local officials involved.