210. Non-Breeders Statistically and Historically - 2

Non-Breeders Statistically and Historically - 2

This is the continuation of entry 209, where I mentioned the possibility, that giving birth could trigger the procreation instinct in women, which seems neither to be widespread in general nor as a result of becoming pregnant, as I got from the data on abortion in Wyman's lecture 21.   
In entry 205, I had already mentioned infanticide and abandoning children by choice including the example of Rousseau.   But when I wrote that, I was not yet aware of how widespread this was.   
Again, the lecture 7 of Wyman's course on the topic of Demographic Transition in Europe; Mortality Decline  
http://www.cosmolearning.com/video-lectures/demographic-transition-in-europe-mortality-decline-6751/
gives data, that are surprising.   They show in a very drastic way, how easily people got rid of unwanted progeny even after the birth.   The entire lecture is worth watching or reading. 

Some quotes:

"Infanticide was a very large factor in European demography and the rest of the world, [......] but in Europe it was very important. "

"In Milan, from 1840s to 1860s, one third of all children born to married parents--we're not talking about unmarried situations--were left at foundling homes and in foundling homes the death rate was near 100%. More than half of all the children born to working class parents were left in foundling homes, and almost all the illegitimate children were abandoned and the death rates--it was a form of infanticide, you just gave them to a foundling home, they were taken, basically, no care of, they died. It was out of sight."

I had mentioned Rousseau before and in this lecture, I found an original quote of his: 

"My third child was thus deposited in a foundling home just like the first two, and I did the same with the two following. I had five in all. The arrangement seemed to me so good, so sensible, so appropriate that, if I did not boast of it publicly, it was solely out of regard for their mother."

"Another mechanism was sending out children to nurse with wet nurses and the death rate of wet nurse children was enormously high. So, if parents tried to rear their children, the death rate was about one in six at this time. In eighteenth century France between a half and two-thirds of infants that were sent out to nurse died. Even at a higher death rate were the so called baby farms, in the nineteenth century Europe there were--it's like we call them puppy mills now, they were baby farms, and they took in vast numbers of children presumably to wet nurse, but almost none of them survived."

Those data show clearly, that in those days, there was no majority of dedicated breeders, as society appears to consist of today.    It is obvious, that even giving birth does not elicit automatically the procreation instinct in all women.   
I can think of two explanations, that are not mutually exclusive:   The apparent natural wish of a majority of women in our present time is just a myth and the result of brainwashing, or it is a result of massive natural selection.   If the unwanted progeny of the non-breeders by genetic disposition never reach an age to reproduce due to the high mortality, then their genetic disposition will loose prevalence in the gene pool.  Those breeders, who raise as many children as they can, allow their breeding disposition genes to survive.