Unwanted infants (usually girls), the sickly, the handicapped, were all gotten rid of, sometimes by drowning, but usually by abandoning them alongside the road. Often killing an infant was the last desperate measure for peasants who had nowhere to turn for help in raising another child, but it was also a means of controlling the size and composition of families employed by nobles and the well-to-do.
Sporadic attempts were made at various times in Chinese history to exhort people not to kill their own flesh and blood, but infanticide was not a crime, nor was it even considered immoral. In traditional China, it was commonly believed that a child at birth was not yet fully human. The transition from “young animal” to human, it was held, did not occur until a child was around six months old. Infanticide was seen as a regrettable but necessary form of birth control, and little concrete or ongoing help was offered for unwanted children.
In the early decades of the seventeenth century various philanthropic groups were started by the wealthy to help the poor and needy in the lower Yangzi River valley, and by the second half of the century local governments and influential people had joined to establish orphanages there for foundlings. But before this, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Chinese Christians had already begun the work of saving babies.
Accounts by European missionaries record that the earliest of such efforts was one begun by Fr. Pierre van Spiere near Nanjing in 1620. There, Christian women, in defiance of local custom which said that women must not be out alone, would go out at night and pick up babies they found abandoned along the roadside and take them into their own homes to rear.
In the 1630's Fr. Alphonse Vagnoni purchased a house in central China to use as an orphanage for babies in the terrible famine that ravaged the area during those years. The granddaughter of the eminent early convert Xu Guangqi supported the founding of an orphanage in the 1670's in the town near Shanghai where she lived, and donated land for a consecrated cemetery for the many babies that, too sick or too weak and small, did not survive. Christians in Canton and their pastor Fr. Andre-Jean Lubelli rescued over five hundred babies between 1659 and 1664, all of whom were baptized and then entrusted to good families to rear.
Chinese Christian work to rescue abandoned babies continued throughout the seventeenth century as part of their exercise of the corporal works of mercy and their witness as Christians. The number of babies rescued by Chinese Christians compared to those abandoned was small, and the number who survived smaller still. But the value of a right deed is never measured by numbers, and the worth of a life has nothing to do with its length. Chinese Christians in the seventeenth century understood this.
