Content area
Full Text
PANTER-BRICK, Catherine and Malcolm T. SMITH, eds., ABANDONED CHILDREN. Port Chester. NY: Cambridge University Press. 2000, 231pp., $19.95 softcoverand $54.95 hardcover.
In North America public perception of the abandonment of children is most commonly associated with extreme social upheavals or historicized in the social dislocations of the early industrial revolution. The discovery of a newborn infant in the stairwell of Toronto's City Hall and another in a hospital washroom in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (both in 2003), dramatized abandonment as a contemporary reality. Provincial Government efforts to prosecute both mothers underscores the state's advocacy for such children and ambivalence toward recognizing the root causes of abandonment, e.g. homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, and foremost, the context of the woman's pregnancy. Both mothers' motives for abandoning their infants, and the state response to them, have deep historical roots.
As Panter-Brick and Smith's edited volume of thirteen separate contributions informs us, quite diverse societies in different time periods have been forced to ponder how to respond to child abandonment. Fashioning and adjusting the structural and fiscal mechanisms for protecting the weakest and most vulnerable members of the community is an issue that has perplexed societies, governments and religious organizations for centuries. Contributors to...