Auñamendi Eusko EntziklopediaFund Bernardo Estornés Lasa

Despite the very high rates of illegitimate births recorded in the Basque Country during the Modern Age, child abandonment was very rare. It would seem that they were only of some importance in Navarre, which is not unrelated to the fact that children were collected in the General Hospital of Pamplona from the 16th century onwards. In other words, the fact that the admission and upbringing of abandoned children was organised served as a stimulus or invitation to parents to resort to this solution. Because the abandonment of children was a solution, a resource, both for those who were destitute and could not feed all the children born to them and for single mothers who in this way concealed their fault. In the latter case, the economic issue was added to that of honour: the vast majority of these mothers could not provide for their children on their own.

Although abandoning children may seem an act of cruelty, it must be borne in mind that for those who could not feed them, it was offering the children the only chance of survival, however remote it might be. Until the end of the 19th century, breastfeeding was the almost exclusive way to raise a child, as artificial feeding methods were not perfected. When the mother died or was ill or lacked milk, the only possibility for the poor was the poorhouse. Well-to-do families used to have their children brought up by wet nurses in the countryside. To hand over the child on the lathe or simply to expose it was to turn to the institutions to take over the child's upbringing. What is dramatic is that for the institutions to fulfil this social role, it was not enough (with exceptions such as the Inclusa in Pamplona) to this necessary and vital help: they had to be forced to provide it by presenting the fait accompli, abandoning the child, trying to erase all traces of its origin so that its parents could not be found and forcing them to take it back.

The abandonment of children can also be considered as an overcoming of another more drastic practice to eliminate the mouths that could not be maintained, such as infanticide. Except in very rare cases, children were always left in such a way that they could be picked up quickly, in churches, at the doors of individuals, of the priest, of the mayor, in the hamlets. They used to be left at night, but shouts were made to alert those inside to come out and pick them up as soon as possible. In the Inclusas, there were turnstiles where children were deposited anonymously at any time of the day or night. Through the turnstiles, children from the locality and those from nearby areas were brought into the establishment. They represented greater security for the child's life than exposure. Another way of abandoning them was to hand them over to a third person, often the midwife, at the Inclusa, or to the local parish priest, who took charge of sending the child to the establishment. During the 19th century, the modalities of abandonment underwent a remarkable evolution. Exposure decreased while a new form of abandonment, characteristic of the century, was introduced: Maternity Departments were opened in all the convents, where unmarried pregnant women were admitted from the 7th month onwards. In the midst of extreme clandestine measures, they remained hidden there until they gave birth and then left, leaving the children in the institution in the vast majority of cases.

In Table A:

The evolution is reflected in the data of four five-year periods covering 150 years of the establishment's life. Along with a stable use (except in the 20th century) of the lathe, the number of exposures falls sharply while the abandonment of the Maternity Hospital follows the opposite trend. In Guipúzcoa, where maternity wards were established in the Casas de Socorro (former Misericordias) of San Sebastián and Tolosa around 1845, this type of abandonment also took precedence over the others. Of the 637 children abandoned in the district of San Sebastián in the decade 1856 and 1865, 46 were abandoned in the Maternity Ward, which is equivalent to 7.2%, a very modest figure. In the following decade, when 769 babies were abandoned, 224 were born in the Maternity Ward, representing 29.1% of the total. By the end of the century the trend had continued to increase. For the ten years from 1893 to 1902 the following results can be drawn: Abandoned, 916; in the Maternity Ward, 396, 43.2 %.

The only Inclusa that existed in the Basque Country until the beginning of the 19th century was the one in Pamplona. We know for certain that children were taken in there from the end of the 16th century, but we have no other data until the beginning of the 18th century. The surviving books of income records begin in 1710, as well as those of payments to the wet-nurses. The children occupied a ward in the General Hospital of Pamplona; in 1804 a Casa de Expósitos was opened, separate and autonomous from the Hospital, which was built thanks to the economic contribution and the concern felt for the problem of abandoned children by the then Prior of Roncesvalles, Don Joaquín Xavier de Uriz, who was later Bishop of Pamplona and who in 1801 had published the book ‘Causas prácticas de la muerte de los niños expósitos en sus primeros años’ (Practical causes of the death of foundlings in their first years). Children abandoned in Guipúzcoa were admitted in Pamplona except those belonging to the diocese of Calahorra, who, together with those from Biscay and Alava, were taken via Calahorra to the Hospital de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Zaragoza. Some children from Ultrapuertos were exposed in villages on this side of the border so that they could be sent to Pamplona; until well into the 19th century there was no Inclusa in Bayonne. The Province of Guipúzcoa organised the collection of foundlings from 1804 onwards but did not build an establishment until 100 years later when the Fraisoro Crèche was inaugurated in 1903. The set up by the Province for the whole of the 19th century consisted of the maintenance of 4 torno-houses or small premises in San Sebastián, Tolosa, Bergara and Azpeitia where children were abandoned or where those found exposed were taken. They remained there for the shortest possible time in the care of a temporary wet nurse and were immediately handed over to their definitive wet nurses, generally women from farmhouses where they were raised until they were 8 years old, at which age the payment from the Diputación ceased: the wet nurse could then choose to return the child who entered the Misericordia, or to foster him, either because she had established bonds of affection with him that were difficult to break, or because he was a valued and cheap labour force, or for both reasons at the same time. For its part, the Señorío de Vizcaya opened a Casa de Expósitos in Bilbao in 1807, under the control of the Diputación. The foundling was similar everywhere; the difference in Guipúzcoa was that it lacked an establishment where children were collected, where those who were not taken to be breastfed were kept, and where those who were not given up were handed over. But this deficiency was remedied through the Misericordias.

Until the middle of the 18th century, the abandonment of children was an unusual practice in the Basque Provinces, as we can place it at a rate of 0.1 and 0.5% of those baptised. For decades, most villages did not collect a single foundling. Even in the five-year period 1761-65 only 13 children from Guipuzcoa, 8 from Bizkaia and none from Alava were admitted to the General Hospital of Saragossa. Although the spectacular increase in the number of exposures in Europe really took place in the 18th century, during the two previous centuries its practice, relatively moderate, was appreciably superior to that of the Basque Country. This difference cannot be explained by the existence of laws obliging fathers to take care of their illegitimate children, since these laws were applied in all countries. A possible explanation may be provided by the extension of the trunk family: it would be easier to accommodate a child in a large family where grandparents and grandchildren, nephews and uncles, brothers and sisters-in-law live together than in a nuclear family made up only of parents and children. Insofar as this family model was not predominant in the whole of Navarre, but only in the northern areas, this would be another factor explaining the greater number of exposures in Navarre than in the rest of the Basque Country.

Table B s both the general increase in the number of children admitted to the Inclusa in Pamplona during the 18th century and the number of children from Guipuzcoa taken there. At the same time as the number of children was increasing, illegitimacy was decreasing throughout the 18th century in the country. Fewer children were born out of wedlock and a much higher proportion of them were abandoned than in previous centuries. With the advance of the total repression of sexuality and its reduction to the marital sphere, feelings of modesty and shame developed towards everything related to sex: more and more illegitimate pregnancies were concealed and, as a logical consequence, the abandonment of the newborn was resorted to, a real proof of the crime. In addition to the growing social rejection, also in this century, single mothers were finding it increasingly difficult for fathers to be forced to take care of their children, to the extent that it was even forbidden to seek paternity; finally, there was also a crisis in the family structure: the family structure was beginning to be eroded, the Basque landlord was losing ownership of his farmhouse and becoming a tenant, while land ownership was being monopolised by a minority.

See BOY, GIRL (Index voice)