The confusion here is one that academics have been battling for at least thirty years, which is the conflation of exposure and execution. It’s easy to do because we, as modern people with 2.4 children, see child abandonment occur only in times of desperation and we assume that babies being placed outdoors and rejected from their biological family means that they died. The truth is they mostly didn’t. A lot of babies were exposed in local places which were sort of designated baby-abandoning spots. If you had a kid and couldn’t look after it for whatever reason, such as you already had seven,
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