22. The Romans practiced exposure of infants for population control as well
Despite the laws mandating married couples throughout the empire to produce children, exposure of children as practiced by the Greeks was common in Roman society. It was not limited to children born frail or suffering from a deformity of some type. Perfectly healthy children could be and were abandoned to face their fate simply as a means of keeping the family small. In Rome (as in Greece) female infants were more likely to be abandoned. Some were lucky, adopted as foundlings into other families, but many were not, and died of thirst and exposure. The practice was followed across the Roman empire.
As noted, exposure was a method of disposing of unwanted children in many societies of the ancient world. Moses was abandoned by his natural mother, and found among the bulrushes by a Princess of Egypt, at least according to the Hebrew Bible. It continued in Rome through most of the fourth century, though in 313 Constantine enacted a law which allowed unwanted children to be sold. Most such children were thus doomed to spend their lives as slaves. Babies who were exposed could be picked up and made into slaves before Constantine’s action, eventually increasing the workforce, another reason the brutal means of population control was tolerated even as Christianity spread across the Roman Empire.
