ABSTRACT
The long-awaited government infant life protection Bill of 1890, 1 which we left at Chapter 12, contained a number of proposals for strengthening the 1872 Act, but the real bone of contention was its intent to extend registration to ‘one-child’ foster-homes. Backbenchers complained that this could inconvenience ‘neighbourly arrangement’ cases – for example, where infection in the family demanded that a baby be boarded away temporarily with a neighbour for its own safety. The government agreed to refer the bill to a Select Committee 2 which produced an amended version. This confined the ‘one-child’ registration to illegitimate children, the baby-farmers’ staple, with the intent of letting out the ‘neighbourly arrangement’ which was assumed to relate primarily to legitimates. To the same end it extended the range of exemptions under the 1872 Act to cases where the child was boarded away because the parent was seeking work, indisposed or for ‘any other reasonable and temporary cause’. The looseness of the drafting – minders might be deceived about the child’s legitimacy, and the phrase ‘reasonable and temporary cause’ could mean anything – made it a non-starter, and it was dropped in August 1890.
