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Conclusion The Foundling Disappears—Almost In the first decades of the twentieth century, three out of New York’s four foundling asylums closed their doors. According to their own goals, they had failed. They had been unable to effect any change in the moral complexion of their society, and they could cope neither with the massive immigration that overburdened their resources nor with the political and ethnic strife in which they became entangled. Worst of all, they had not been able to stem the persistent, tragic death rate of the infants they took in. But despite their failures, and as a result of no efforts of theirs, infant abandonment as a mass phenomenon receded dramatically in the twentieth century. The inadequacy of government record-keeping on foundlings makes it difficult to provide exact figures, and it is also hard to know which groups of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children are the precise counterparts of nineteenth-century foundlings. Can the children who were never born as a result of the greater availability and efficacy of birth control and abortion in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries be considered the equivalents of babies who were born and abandoned in the nineteenth? Are “boarder babies”—newborn babies afflicted by poverty, drug use, and AIDS who were left behind by their parents in hospitals in epidemic numbers in the late twentieth century—equivalent to the foundlings of the nineteenth century, the products of poverty and illegitimacy ?1 But if we look simply at the numbers of babies picked up in the streets, abandoned at foundling asylums, or born in foundling asylums, the available figures create a very striking picture of change. Between 1880 and 1885, a period for which figures from all four asylums are largely complete and roughly comparable, the four institutions together received an average of approximately 2,041 babies each year (including both babies born inside the institutions and those brought in from outside). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, New York 7 226 City statistics on foundlings have become scattershot. There are no longer four foundling asylums with resident populations to count, and neither city, state, or federal governments maintain a count of foundlings .2 Still, it is possible to assemble a few figures. In December 2000, for instance, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office estimated that during the preceding decade a total of forty-seven newborns had been abandoned in Brooklyn.3 For the two-and-a-half-year period ending in June 2003, the city’s Department of Children’s Services reported that a total of thirteen babies under five months were abandoned in all five boroughs . Of these, just two were picked up in Manhattan—an enormous change from the era when a foundling was named for nearly every downtown corner.4 Resorting to press reports for its source material, the United States Department of Health and Human Services concluded that in 1991, in all of the United States, sixty-five babies were abandoned in public places. In 1998, the number rose to 105. In 2006, just six abandoned newborns were collected in New York City.5 By the opening of the twenty-first century, the foundling problem, according to one Illinois public official, was “hardly a national epidemic.”6 Conclusion | 227 table 7.1 Children Born in and Received at New York City’s Foundling Asylums, 1880–85 Infant Hospital, NY Foundling NY Infant Nursery and Randall’s Islanda Asylumb Asylumc Child’s Hospitald Rec’d. Born Total Rec’d. Born Total Rec’d. Born Total Rec’d. Born Total 1880 406 — 406 [752] [29] [781] — — 160 149 155 304 1881 375 — 375 893 85 978 — — 244 162 181 343 1882 415 — 415 878 128 1006 — — 247 223 232 455 1883 460 — 460 928 133 1061 — — 242 275 219 494 1884 489 — 489 811 128 939 — — 286 196 212 408 1885 447 — 447 904 144 1048 — — 295 136 229 365 a From Table A, Census Report of Infant Hospital, in PCC, annual reports, 1880–85. These are the children identified by the Infant Hospital during these years as “orphans,” or motherless babies. No babies were born in the Infant Hospital since it did not have childbirth facilities. See the table 6.1 note for additional information. b NYFA, biennial report, 1879–81, 22–23; annual reports, 1881, 16; 1882, 14; 1883, 13; 1884, 45; 1885, 49. The admissions figures in the 1879–81 biennial report are for October...

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