The Complex History of Fetal Remains
The management of fetal remains has a complicated history in Western Europe and the United States. The Christian church long excluded unbaptized infants, including stillborn children, from consecrated burial grounds. The medieval Church taught that the unbaptized were destined to burn in Hell for eternity, and even popular belief in Limbo still left parents believing their stillborn children would never see Heaven. In distress at this state of affairs, parents sometimes defied ecclesiastical prohibitions by refusing to use a special burial site far from the church. Instead they buried full-term and near-term stillbirths next to the church where water from the roof above the altar–the most sacred part of the structure–would run onto the graves of these unbaptized children, representing the hope of baptism even in death.[1] Yet these remained unmarked graves of unnamed children, typically excluded from family records.
Even informal burial was not universal. Stillborn and miscarried fetal remains were treated casually often enough that authorities had to give explicit instructions for respectful treatment. A 1649 English oath for midwives instructed, “if any childe bee dead borne, you your selfe shall see it buried in such secret place as neither Hogg nor Dogg, nor any other Beast may come unto it… [and] you shall not suffer any such childe to be cast into the Jaques [privy] or any other inconvenient place.”
Quiet, unmarked burials continued into the twentieth century in many places. A Lancashire craftsman described how in the 1950s, “‘If tha didn’t get kiddy baptised by t’parson, it would have to be put in a box and stuck in t’ground like some sort o’ animal … It wouldn’t be right like a proper babby, it would be just like burying a dog or a sheep’.”[2] Formal modes of social recognition treated miscarriages and stillbirths more like the loss of a pet or a barn animal than a person.
Contrary to the midwives’ oath, fetal remains did sometimes end up in privies. Historians have presumed that these were often cases in which women were hiding their pregnancies and likely aborted them. In one well-documented case from 1650, a young, single servant was convicted for infanticide after concealing her pregnancy and miscarrying into the privy, despite expert testimony that the fetus was pre-viable. Archaeologists have excavated fetal skeletons from nineteenth-century American outhouses attached to brothels as well as middle-class households, suggesting that women across classes sometimes quietly ended pregnancies and disposed of the products of conception without ceremony.