The definition of a stillbirth was probably neither standardized nor static in our communities, so
some of the changes we observe may reflect changes in recording practices rather than (or in addition to)
changes in the experience of late-term fetuses. There are two reasons for uncertainty about recording
practices. First, religious concerns about the child’s soul may have encouraged the baptism of children
even if they were really stillborn. Lutherans (like Catholics) held that baptized children go to heaven,
while unbaptized children do not. Adherents of such beliefs might baptize children who were actually
stillborn.39 Second, non-religious changes in the understanding of “birth” might lead to different
judgments about an individual child.
The registers of baptism and burial for our communities include various notations that we have
sorted into binary categories of “born alive” and “stillborn.” Under “stillborn” we include children listed
as “born dead”, including the additional notation “premature” or “miscarriage”, as well as “died shortly
after the birth.” Several other notations suggest that a child was weak at birth or died soon after, but we do
not include these in the stillbirth designation. These include indications that the child was given
emergency baptism (Gähtauf, Nottauf), but did not die immediately; that the child was baptized at home
or by the midwife or father, implying emergency baptism; that the child died shortly after the birth or
during an emergency baptism; or that the child was weak at birth (without there being any notation of
death). Ours is a conservative parsing of the primary-source information, which is why we present results
separately in the text using a broader definition of stillbirth. In practice, however, a more expansive
reading of the primary sources would not give rise to appreciably different results. For example, we have
coded children marked as “nameless” as not stillborn. One could make a case for these instances being
ambiguous, but there is a total of 10 such births in Wildberg (out of a total of 15,509) and 35 in Ebhausen
(out of 12,005). They cannot be a major source of estimation error.
39
At least this belief is persistent in the historical demography literature; for example, Kintner (1987, p.237) claims “they [Catholics] tended to register stillbirths as infant deaths, thereby inflating the recorded infant mortality rate.”
40
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