...in the 1700s and 1800s. It was legal to slit a baby's throat or leave it out in the cold ("exposure") so it would die. This was a significant problem, and it was legal to kill infants, after they were born, up until the late 1920s.

I am listening to

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060922559/qid=1136518573/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-3832880-3221711?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths.

This guy is truly hilarious. Openly gay kings (Richard the Lionheart! a gay! Who knew!) and queens, British "tradition" debunked as modern "make work" for the royalty...I love it.

Of course, I haven't done any actual fact-checking. It's more fun to believe what this guy says.

The Romans would throw their unwanted children, alive, into the dump out side the city.

The Spartans would drop ALL their newborns off a cliff and the ones that survived were strong enough to be Spartans.

Some ancient cultures would put their firstborn in a jar and bury the jar in the mud filled wall of their house.

Other ancients would eat some of their children. It was a delicacy.

All these sorts of practices have been around for thousands of years. Who is to say that it isn't wrong?

Ayatollah Khomeini said that it was acceptable to have sex with an infant as long as it was at least 3 months old. And now the facists are trying to prosecute this sort of stuff, even though religious leaders have said it is acceptable.

Just more of the anti-islamic bigotry from the red states.

In Victorian england, impoverished women would pay others to kill their infants for them:

http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm

It was called "Baby Farming".

"The primary objective of professional baby farmers was to solicit as many sickly infants or infants under two months as possible, because life was precarious for them and their deaths would appear more natural. They would adopt the infants for a set fee and get rid of them as quickly as possible in order to maximize their profits. The infants were kept drugged on laudanum, paregoric, and other poisons, and fed watered down milk laced with lime. They quickly died of thrush induced by malnutrition and fluid on the brain due to excessive doses of strong narcotics. The costs of burial was avoided by wrapping the naked bodies of the dead infants in old newspapers and damping them in a deserted area, or by throwing them in the Thames.

"Older infants were also lucrative. These babies, whose young mothers struggled to support and to visit them on a regular basis, were the ones who suffered a slow and agonizing death. Babies accepted under these conditions had to be healthy and robust. They were profitable because they could withstand the most abuse before they finally succumbed; the longer they lasted, the longer the weekly fees were paid. To insure maximum profits the farmers would slowly starve the infants to death. The mothers continued to work night and day to support their infants believing they were being well cared for only to watch them slowly waste away."

Boy - those were the days!

If you want to go to the original source material, one of the first books that described the Victorian practice in detail is available for free reading:

http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/sevencurses.htm

The chapter on baby farming is here:

http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/seven3.htm

Also, if you have the time, don't miss the sections on 'Fallen Women'. Syphillis and opium go together like peanut butter and chocolate!

The gayness of Richard I seems reasonable though that is from a perspective on male behaviour that's entirely different from the medieval one. Was Lincoln gay because he shared a bed with his best male friend for a number of years?

> Was Lincoln gay because he shared a bed with his best male friend for a number of years?

Uhhh, Yes?

The real answer is we don't know.

Of COURSE Lincoln was gay. He was also a cannibal. Other notable gay figures are George Washington, Albert Einstein and Mohatmas Ghandi.

Dude, when they say "Republicans eat their own young" it's not literal...

Philo

Art, you forgot Margaret Thatcher. OK, wrong continent, but still.

Holy crap this is cracking me up.

Thatcher had a husband and kids. Granted they were all creepy, but still.