第二次大戦前後の日本における乳児の生命保護

産婆による乳児保護から児童福祉へ

抄録

In the 1940s in Japan, professionally trained midwives, not doctors, assisted most births by pregnant women. Also, midwives sometimes arranged for the formal or informal adoptions of infants whose parents could not raise them. In 1948, a midwife was arrested for letting an estimated 103 infants left for adoption die at the Kotobuki Maternity Home in Tokyo since 1944. The infanticides were seen as a result of strict anti-abortion regulations in wartime; the incident was used to promote the passage of the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948 to legalize abortion. Most researchers have mentioned infanticides by midwives in the context of women’s reproductive freedom and the decline of midwifery since the 1950s in Japan. This paper uses the perspective of protecting infants’ lives to examine how the infanticide incident affected the situations of women with unintended pregnancies and infants relinquished by their parents. The paper deals with historical materials from mainly the 1930s and 1940s, including newspapers, governmental documents and specialist journals for midwives. From the 1930s to right after the end of World War II, midwives were in charge of giving infant health care counseling and sheltering infants for adoption arrangements. However, after the Kotobuki Maternity Home incident, midwives were prohibited from sheltering infants or arranging adoptions. The Eugenic Protection Law was enacted in 1948 to allow women to undergo abortions; also, infants’ homes and children’s welfare centers, which had been established by the Child Welfare Law of 1947, were given the responsibility of sheltering infants and arranging child adoptions. Furthermore, midwives’ responsibility for infant health care was taken over by public community nurses. The child welfare systems constructed in the postwar era treated pregnant women and infants separately, ending midwives’ more holistic protection of infants’ lives through their interconnected responsibilities of assisting pregnant women and caring for infants.