ABSTRACT
Anthropologists Marvin Harris and Eric Ross speculated long ago that early modern Europeans must have been keeping the number of their offspring in check by means of some form of neonatal death control. There appears to be a universal human tendency towards family limitation, which we can compare with other animal species. Historical research on the incidence of infanticide in criminal justice archives suggests that it was not widespread and remained limited to single mothers. Historians have always suspected that parents could have deliberately killed their newborns if they arrived during an inopportune moment, but no one has studied the sex ratio of baptised infants in a systematic manner in the West until now. Here we explain the method used to explore baptismal registers and the way we can study different social classes separately.
