TRANSCRIPT

On the night of January 12th, 1948, the police were on high alert in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan. Reports of an uptick in violent crime had led to extra patrols in the area, and two police officers were staking out an unlikely building–the Kotobuki Maternity Home. Maternity homes, places for low-income women to give birth and have their children cared for by professional midwives, were a common institution in 1940s Japan. The Kotobuki Home was one of dozens in Tokyo alone. It had been established during the Second World War and was owned and operated by a married couple–a retired police constable named Takeshi Ishikawa and his wife Miyuki, a respected local leader in the field of midwifery. 

One of the police officers watched as Mr. Nagasaki, a local undertaker, left the maternity home and loaded a wooden orange crate onto the back of his bicycle. The police officer stopped him and questioned the undertaker about the box’s contents. When pressed by the police, Mr. Nagasaki was forced to admit the grim truth–he had been called to pick up the body of an infant that had died in the home and take it to his mortuary business, where he would cremate it the next day. The baby was wrapped in a knit shirt and diaper. Upon further questioning, Nagasaki admitted that this was the fifth deceased baby he had picked up from the maternity home–that day.

The officer was suspicious. One infant’s death was a tragedy, five in one day seemed…unusual. Upon further questioning, Mr. Nagasaki admitted that he had removed the bodies of twenty other children from the home since August of the previous year. Nagasaki provided legitimate death certificates for each of the five children who had died that day, so the officer could not legally detain him. He let Nagasaki go. 

The police officer returned to headquarters and reported the incident to the Chief of Police of Waseda Station, Isamu Ide. Chief Ide ordered him to conduct an investigation of the neighborhood that surrounded the maternity home to learn more about its inner workings and reputation. When the officer questioned the neighbors, several of them admitted that they had visited the home the previous year and were concerned that the children weren’t being properly looked after. There were rumors about what went on in that place. The police ordered that the bodies of the deceased children be confiscated from Nagasaki’s mortuary and taken to nearby Keio university for autopsy. 

The examination of the corpses was startling: their stomachs were completely empty. Three of the five children had died of malnutrition and the other two had frozen to death. 

The married couple who owned and operated the maternity home, the Ishikawas, and the undertaker Nagasaki were brought into the police station for questioning. Within days several more children living at the Kotobuki Maternity Home had died, and the seven remaining children were taken from the home to a hospital where they were cared for by nurses. A full-blown investigation into what exactly happened in the home began, and the records that Mr and Mrs. Ishikawa had painstakingly kept since they opened the home in 1944 were seized and examined.

What the records revealed shocked the authorities. What might’ve been the results of an outbreak of disease or the unfortunate consequences of poverty–as has so often happened throughout human history and especially in the aftermath of a global conflict—turned out to be the deliberate and systematic starvation and neglect of over one hundred children.

The mastermind of this ghoulish plot was the most shocking detail of all. 

The children’s deaths and the subsequent cover-ups had been orchestrated by a highly educated and respected professional trained to take care of mothers and children–Miyuki Ishikawa, the director of the Kotobuki Maternity Home, and now known to true crime aficionados by the nickname, “The Demon Midwife.” 

Podcast Intro

You’re listening to Conceiving Crime, the podcast dedicated to Investigating crimes past and present involving sex, procreation, pregnancy, birth, and all things human reproduction. I’m your host, Sami Parker. See the full show notes & links to resources from this episode at ConceivingCrime.com.

Historical Background

At the time of the Ishikawas’ arrest in early 1948, Japan had been under US military occupation for over two years. Since its unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers in August 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, had been charged with the rebuilding of Japan. MacArthur’s role included the demilitarization of Japan and a massive bureaucratic overhaul of the country. The acronym “SCAP” was also used to refer to the governmental apparatus under MacArthur, who worked with local authorities to maintain order across all sectors of society. Since at the time SCAP was still present and involved with internal affairs, American SCAP personnel were part of the investigation of the Kotobuki maternity home incident, and thus we have contemporary English-language documentation about the case from 1948 and 1949. 

SCAP officials accompanied by Japanese authorities went to the maternity home to conduct an in-person inspection. The field survey report they compiled paints a grim picture. Four of the children in the home were visibly malnourished, their bedding and the house itself was unsanitary, and there was no easy access to running water. 

The lax standards of care in the maternity home appalled the inspectors and the general public, but it was not as shocking to contemporary observers as it is now or would have been even a decade earlier. Though it became the most infamous maternity home and the poster child for the mistreatment of mothers and children, it was not the only poorly-run home in Tokyo. In order to understand the circumstances around this tragic case, you need to know a little about Japan in the late 1940s. 

The Second World War left Japan devastated and economically shattered. The United States, principally in charge of rebuilding efforts, had a particular interest in creating a free-market, thriving Japanese economy, in part to prevent the growth of domestic communism. There were widespread food shortages and rationing which began during the war and continued after. Mass-produced instant ramen noodles, ubiquitous with college dorm culture in America today, partly owe their existence to these post-war food shortages. The Taiwanese-born Japanese immigrant Endo Momofuku, the founder of Nissin Foods, was inspired to create the high calorie and cheap meal by the hunger and deprivation he had seen in late 1940s Japan. People would wait in lines for hours for their daily allotted rations of food–at one point amounting to only 1,040 calories. Global food shortages in 1945 and 46 further exacerbated the problem. A widespread black market rose in response to food rationing, as profit could be made by hoarding rare commodities and selling them at outrageous marked up prices.

While this was going on, the population was skyrocketing. Like the United States, Japan went through a massive post-war baby boom. From 1947 to 1949, Japan recorded around 2.7 million births annually, with a fertility rate exceeding 4.3–a peak in recorded history. This extraordinary baby boom has been attributed to a surge in marriages that had been delayed by the war, though some scholars speculate the loss of the Second World War had led to mass demoralization, the consequence of which was less interest or commitment to family planning–whether by artificial birth control or natural methods. Whatever the reason, it was indisputable that millions of children were born to a country struggling to house, clothe and feed its existing population–never mind the next generation. 

The ostensible reason that Miyuki Ishikawa and her husband had opened the Kotobuki Maternity Home in 1944 was to help impoverished women birth and care for their children. The children born at the hospital were usually conceived out of wedlock, their mothers prostitutes, female servants, war widows or women who did not have the means to take care of their children. In a desire to promote “human capital” and to prevent infanticide, the Japanese government had authorized maternity homes run by midwives to take in these pregnant mothers, care for them through birth, and then find their unwanted and unfairly stigmatized children parents willing to adopt them. In dense urban areas like Tokyo there were dozens of homes dotted across the city. Regulatory laws existed to keep track of children born in such maternity homes, but that didn’t mean they were followed rigorously. Even with the limited resources and heavy rationing, the degraded condition of the Kotobuki home shocked the investigators. 

The meticulous records that the authorities inspected of the Kotobuki Maternity Home showed a curious pattern. In 1944, the year it was established, the home had admitted 14 to 15 children. In 1945 and 46, it had been between 30 and 40 children per year–but in 1947 over 100 children were admitted. The reason for this dramatic increase was apparently because the Ishikawas had begun advertising their business in several newspapers. The advertisement asked for children between one and three years of age. According to the home’s own records, no more than ten or twelve of the children who had lived there in 1947 had actually been born in the house itself. The majority of the 1947 children were illegitimate and had been brought to the home by their mothers at a few weeks or months old. The mothers paid between 5000 and 6000 yen to the Ishikawas to take their children. They relinquished all rights to the children, and the Ishikawas would theoretically find homes for these babies so they could be adopted out. 

According to reports made the week of the Ishikawas’ arrest, the couple initially claimed that the reason the five children in their care in January of 1948 had died was that the couple had started to receive powdered milk rations that month that they didn’t know how to properly prepare. They claimed the children had died from dysentery–but even if that was true, it wouldn’t explain the autopsy’s findings–and it certainly wouldn’t explain the 85 other children who had died in the care of the Ishikawas in 1947–most within the first month of their arrival. The vast majority of the children who had come through the home hadn’t lived long enough for the adoptions the Ishikawas were supposed to be facilitating. 

It also didn’t explain another detail of the investigation that completely refuted the narrative that the children’s malnutrition was an unfortunate bi-product of the post-war deprivation across the country: large stocks of hoarded food that were found on the premises. The police seized eighteen pounds of powdered milk, twelve pounds of sugar and forty two pounds of rice from the house. 

Within days of the initial encounter between the officer and Nagasaki the undertaker, the motive was clear: the children were being starved to death to line the pockets of Miyuki and Takeshi Ishikawa. The police, according to contemporary records, considered the maternity home label a “front” for what was actually a child adoption agency–but with a sinister twist, designed to turn what should have been a charitable venture into a money-making operation. 

The police calculated that throughout 1947, between the amount they charged each mother and what they had to pay in undertaker fees and expenses made on behalf of the children, the Ishikawas had made half a million yen gross profit from the Kotobuki Maternity home. As a maternity home they were also entitled to government-issued rations meant for their dependent charges. The Ishikawas had sold the powdered milk on the black market instead of giving it to the children. Even the rations of sake given by the government when a child died (meant to be used in Buddhist funeral rites) were sold on the black market–though Mr. Ishikawa bragged at a pharmacy near the home that he would save one of the two bottles they received when each child died for himself. Though he denied his complicity in the murders, in police interrogations, Mr. Ishikawa admitted that the business wouldn’t have functioned if one of their foster children could not be disposed of within a few months–specifically that their business “wouldn’t prosper if the children grew healthy.” 

An investigation of Mr. Nagasaki’s funeral home found the cremated remains of between thirty and forty children. The initial findings of the authorities were staggering: of the 199 children the Ishikawas had taken in,168 had died–85 percent. Later reporting lowered the number to around 100 children, and the most conservative estimates of the prosecutors in the case landed at 85. 

Less than a week after the initial encounter between the undertaker and police officer, the story broke to the general public. The immediate response, as reported in the Asahi Shinbun paper on January 17th, was heartbreaking: 

On the 16th, when the news of the "adopted baby murder" was reported, shocked mothers who had left their children at Kotobuki Maternity Hospital and the police rushed to the hospital. A woman (27) who runs a coffee shop in Yokohama's Kohoku Ward came to Kotobuki Maternity Hospital and went up to the second floor…in a 3-tatami room with torn paper doors and no fire, eight heads were lined up on a bamboo bed. The third from the left was the baby she had left there on the 11th. She burst out crying and hugged him. She tried to breastfeed him, but he wouldn't drink. The woman cried even more furiously, saying that he had forgotten how to drink, and stroked the baby's swollen head. She was shocked to hear that the baby sleeping on the far right…with gauze wrapped around its mouth was the body of a baby who had died on the 15th. She returned to Yokohama, saying, "I can't leave him here for even a moment…I was abandoned by my husband and could not return to my parents, so I found out about this maternity hospital through a newspaper ad and paid the 6,000 yen deposit fee to have my baby disposed of."

There was considerable and immediate public outcry the week that the Ishikawas were arrested. An English language news report from January 19th recalled a visit to the police station by a member of the public who requested an interview with the Ishikawas. When she was told that the couple were having dinner, she said, “Absolutely give no food to the devilish couple, who denied the babies milk.”

The week of the initial SCAP investigation, seven infants were found alive at the hospital. Two of them died on the evening of the 14th and the morning of the 15th, two were taken home by their biological mothers, two were adopted and one disappeared from the public records altogether. A few parents who had left their children in the home months before came to check what had happened to them. They were forced to face the fact that the better life they thought they were leaving their children there to gain would never materialize.

On the 26th of January, the Ishikawas and one of the midwives who worked under the wife were indicted on charges of murder. Mr. Nagasaki the undertaker, who had also been arrested, was released because there was insufficient evidence to make him a knowing accomplice, as there was no way to prove he had known the death certificates he had been given were illegitimate. 

Mrs. Ishikawa attempted to justify and excuse herself by placing the blame and culpability on the parents who left their children with her, claiming that the children she received into her care were already sick and malnourished and that she fed them to the best of her abilities. 

As the investigation went on, Mrs. Ishikawa and her conspirators’ tangled plot began to unravel. This case led to the obvious question–how could they have gotten away with this sinister money-making scheme for so long? Who was working with them? And who–if anyone–suspected the truth?

Who Were the Ishikawas?

The Criminals and their Accomplices

Miyuki Ishikawa was an unlikely candidate for the title ‘serial killer’. Born in 1897 in a village in the Miyazaki Prefecture, she moved to Tokyo at age 18 after graduating from a local vocational school. She then went on to take a midwifery course at Tokyo University and upon graduating became a certified midwife. Miyuki was highly educated for a Japanese woman of her time and had come from an upper class background. At the time of her arrest, she had been working in and running maternity hospitals for over 30 years, and had even run (unsuccessfully) for public office. She and her husband weren’t able to have biological children because Miyuki had had a hysterectomy, so they adopted three children, while Miyuki also helped raise her husband’s children from his first marriage. Takeshi was from the Ibaraki prefecture, was three years older than his wife and had been a sergeant in the military secret police as well as a regular police officer. At the time of their arrest, he had no full-time regular employment and assisted his wife in her business. 

The investigation revealed the Ishikawa’s had a criminal ring working for them–starting with the funeral director who had first aroused suspicion. In exchange for quietly disposing of the children’s bodies, the undertaker Mr. Nagasaki had been paid 500 yen per infant corpse. In addition to the remains found at his house, further investigation revealed that an accomplice undertaker had disposed of a further forty infant bodies on behalf of the couple. A bone urn containing the remains of a child was found hidden in a kerosene can at the Ishikawas’ home. The police believed it to be the child of a well-known public figure that the couple had hidden in some rice when they knew the house was going to be searched. And who provided Nagasaki with the supposedly legitimate death certificates? 

On January 18th a medical doctor named Shiro Nakayama was arrested in connection with the children’s deaths. The Ishikawas employed the 60-year-old Doctor Nakayama, who would prepare death certificates for the Ishikawas without examining the body of the child and lie about the cause to mask their crimes from the authorities. Dr. Nakayama was paid 500 yen per corpse and had falsified at least 60 death certificates at the time of his arrest. The children in the home fell into two categories–“registered” and “unregistered.” Registered children had been legally declared a member of their respective families at birth. Unregistered children, who were usually born to unmarried couples, had not. Because of the lack of a paper trail, unregistered children were easier for prospective parents to adopt, but it was more difficult to obtain death certificates or government rations for them. The Ishikawas would frequently lie about the childrens’ statuses to maximize profits. They would falsely claim a registered child was unregistered when adopting them out, and later use the same child’s name to obtain a death certificate when one of the unregistered babies died. Conversely, when a registered child died, they would report the death as unregistered and continue to collect rations for the dead child–embezzling government food stores, in other words. The investigators even found proof that the couple were re-selling diapers and baby supplies on the black market that the parents had sent for their children’s use.

The Ishikawas had turned what should have been a public service for the most vulnerable in society into an efficient and organized criminal venture. At the time of her arrest, Miyuki Ishikawa, a citizen of one of the most economically depressed post-war societies, had a telephone in her house (an extreme luxury item at the time), had purchased land in both Tokyo and the Ibaraki Prefecture, and was in the process of purchasing an expensive car.

And what of the midwives who worked at the Maternity Home under Ishikawa’s supervision? 

In the end, only one was arrested as an accomplice to Miyuki’s crimes. She was identified at the trial as “Midwife Assistant K”, and had worked with Mrs. Ishikawa for a year before her arrest. Midwife Assistant K had wanted to study under Miyuki because of her great reputation in the field–but she could only stand working at the Kotobuki Maternity Home for a year before she begged to return to her home in the country. She and the dozen or so other assistant midwives who worked under Mrs. Ishikawa saw firsthand the deterioration in care for the children, as intake (boosted significantly by the advertisements) increased and adoption placement decreased. Children were reportedly given half-rations of milk, were not bathed or changed, and were only taken to the doctor when they were about to die. The children who didn’t starve froze to death. Many of the on-call midwives in the neighborhood who were employed in the facility did request more food, warming measures and staff, and were told by Miyuki that they should simply do as they were told. Many resigned in protest. One woman who had worked at the home told the newspaper that she and the other employees were told to give “just two spoonfuls of powdered milk, three spoonfuls of sugar, and water six times a day. This is half the amount a normal child should receive."

Of the children who didn’t die, a small number were re-adopted by their biological parents. The rest were adopted by parents who responded to the newspaper advertisements. The savvy Miyuki was able to maximize the profits even in this end of the business–collecting 400 to 500 yen per child from the adoptive parents, in addition to the money she’d already received from their birth mothers. 

A woman who adopted a baby girl from the hospital recalled her experience with the mercenary Miyuki in a newspaper interview the week of her arrest: "When I said I wanted a girl, the midwife showed me two babies and said, 'This one's 300 yen, but this one's good looking, so I'll take 500 yen.' She acted like she was selling items in a shop."

There was a backlash against the authorities for letting these crimes go on for so long. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper criticized the case, saying, "Even before the incident was discovered, rumors of something unusual had been circulating around Kotobuki Hospital, and an extraordinary number of death reports had been filed, but the police and government offices did not take any action." One of the local police precincts even admitted that they had been warned by people in the neighborhood the summer before that the maternity didn’t bathe the children and left them naked and unprotected from mosquitoes. The home itself had pointed to their own expensive advertisements as proof of the unlikelihood of these claims.

The police and mayor both tried to downplay their culpability, claiming that they had not had the authority to investigate as freely as they wanted because of the American occupation. Whether criticisms of their inaction were fair or not, in the court of public opinion, the government and the society as a whole that had let this happen were harshly judged. The ramifications of this care on public policy around child care, support of birth control and, ultimately, abortion are still felt in Japan today. 

The Trial and Societal Implication

The criminal trial began in June of 1948 in a Tokyo District Court. Mrs. Ishikawa pleaded not guilty to the murder charge, admitting only that she had insufficiently supervised the midwives under her. The truth was that the neglect and abuse of children had been done by her express orders and had been protested by her employees. Even some of the mothers had run away from the home when they saw the shocking treatment of children. “The demon midwife” was apparently a nickname Miyuki had garnered even before the extent of her crimes became public knowledge. 

The case shocked the Japanese public, and inspired passionate debate across all social classes and in the government.

In an impassioned speech given on the floor of the Japanese Diet in early February 1948, Michiko Yamazaki, a member of the Japanese Socialist Party, decried the rise of organized crime and the lack of government oversight that had led to the Kotobuki Maternity Home incident: 

The Kotobuki Maternity Hospital is just the tip of the iceberg that has appeared between the waves… politics should have ears that listen to the voices of the voiceless. Social facilities such as maternity hospitals, nursing homes, nursery schools, mother-child dormitories, and nurturing centers should be established by public institutions as soon as possible, and the weakest people should be saved as soon as possible through the administration of laws with love and tears. Particular effort should be put into it…and at the same time, we will enact the Eugenic Protection Law as soon as possible to control the childbirth of people who are in various unfortunate circumstances.

Eugenics had been imported from the West to Japan in the early twentieth century and its ideas were popularized in the 1930s. The Eugenic Protection Law that Yamazai spoke of as so critical to “controlling childbirth” allowed authorities to forcibly sterilize people with disabilities, including those with mental disorders, hereditary diseases or physical deformities, and leprosy. It also allowed forced abortions if either parent had those conditions. In July of 1948 the law was amended to legalize abortion in Japan for the “health of the mother.” A year later it would be amended to include abortion for “economic” reasons–effectively decriminalizing the practice, though the crime of abortion remained in the penal code. Abortion and birth control advocates in Japan used the incident–and mass investigations of maternity homes that took place after–to push through legalizing and normalizing both in Japanese law and society. 

Amidst the outcry there were some rather callous public views expressed as well. Tokugawa Musei, a popular Japanese humorist, expressed sympathy for the hospital and the general widespread belief that the children’s illegitimacy made their unfortunate deaths almost inevitable. Yuriko Miyamoto, a feminist writer, publicly pushed back on the fatalistic narrative about the state of illegitimate children in Japanese society: 

The fact that the children left at Kotobuki Maternity Hospital were not born legitimately is being presented as if it was inevitable that the children were killed…what kind of difference is there between a legitimate child and an illegitimate child for the child herself? No matter what kind of relationship the man and woman have, they are still a child of a human being, and the word "born" definitely refers to a relationship in which a child who appeared in this world did not give birth to himself…moreover, today, when the distinction between illegitimate children is no longer even made on family registers, all children have the right to have their lives guaranteed as children of society. And we have a duty to do so. The Women's and Children's Bureau was established to conduct research and make proposals to the government regarding all aspects of the lives of women and children. I believe that economic difficulties and the problems of children's lives are fundamental issues for the Women's Bureau as well. The fact that the Kotobuki Maternity Hospital exists clearly shows that the state must establish child care centers, maternity hospitals, and daycare centers as social facilities.

The push for social change that the incident garnered did happen–with childcare and child policies centralized with stricter government regulation, the abolishment of private maternity hospitals and the dissolution of the Japanese Midwives’ Association to which Miyuki belonged.

On August 20, the Ishikawas and Assistant K were granted bail–after which the couple moved back into the Kotobuki Maternity home, which was now closed for business. On September 3, the prosecution began its closing arguments, stating that 84 people died between April 1946 and January 1948, of which 27 were clearly murders. 

Because the children had been killed by neglect and the records–particularly of the unregistered children–were so spotty, the mass-scale crimes proved difficult for the authorities to prove. In the end the couple were only found guilty of killing the five children who were initially discovered. Miyuki was sentenced to fifteen years in prison while her husband was sentenced to just seven and Assistant K three. An additional court ruling halved the couples’ sentencing to just eight and four years in prison and acquitted the midwife’s assistant altogether. Still unsatisfied with what was by all accounts an extremely light punishment for the crime of mass infanticide, the couple appealed in April 1952 and had their sentences further reduced to four years and two years in prison. According to an interview with Miyuki Ishikawa published in 1969, Miyuki was released from prison under the general amnesty of the San Francisco Peace Treaty–which came into effect the same day as her appeal ruling. 

A little more than four years after she was first arrested, Miyuki Ishikawa was a free woman. 

What Happened to Miyuki Ishikawa? The Legacy of the Demon Midwife and laws in Japan

The exact number of the Ishikawa victims is unknown–but the police estimates put it somewhere between 103 and 169 babies. Only 30 of the mothers came forward after the initial arrests. It’s believed that many of the parents of the unregistered, illegitimate children placed in the home were too ashamed to admit that they had given their children to her, and so the exact number of children who were killed remains a mystery. Given the rumors and innuendo surrounding the Ishikawas’ business and the fact that investigation of maternity homes proved this was not an isolated incident, it’s possible some of the parents left their children in Miyuki Ishikawa’s care knowing full well what would happen to them. 

21 years after the incident, Miyuki Ishikawa–now a free and successful real estate and sales mogul–was happy to lay the blame at the feet of the parents who had left their children in her care. In a newspaper interview in 1969, she defended her actions, claiming that the real fault lay with the parents who had handed their children over to her: 

I never killed the children. Killing would mean strangling the child myself or putting my hands on the child. I would never do such a thing. No, the children certainly died. But I also fed them as much as possible. I had the children examined by a doctor. But the children still died. It wasn't just at our maternity hospital that infants died. They died because they didn't have anything to eat at that house or at this house or that house. And not only that, they were children who were left in our care as if they were abandoned. Not a single parent would have come to the maternity hospital to check on their child. And then, after it became an incident, they would say, “My child was treated so badly. I gave birth to a bastard child, and I had no choice but to abandon her. Which is worse? Think about it.

Miyuki Ishikawa died in the late 1980s, a wealthy woman who had only occasionally expressed remorse for her actions–usually when it suited her to do so. The legacy she left goes beyond the children who died in her care. The incident marked a serious turning point in Japanese law: the legalization of abortion for “economic” reasons–the effective decriminalization of the practice. People believed that in order to prevent unwanted children–the children from a stigmatized class that Ishikawa “got away” with killing because of their marginalized place in society–mothers should instead be permitted to have abortions. The logic was that mothers should not be put in the position of having to give their children to people like Miyuki Ishikawa–but was that the correct moral conclusion to draw from her crimes? How many children were killed before they were born as a result of this policy–and who was truly punished, the woman who died wealthy at a comfortable old age, or the generation of children who never got a chance to be born and live?

25,000 people were sterilized against their will under the 1948 Eugenic Protection Law, which was in place in Japan until 1996. The Japanese Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the surviving victims of this policy, stating that depriving them of their right to have children was unconstitutional and awarding financial damages for the violation of their rights. In July of 2024, the elderly plaintiffs held up banners with their lawyers and supporters outside the court. 

Though their suffering was very different from that of those parents who left their children with the Demon Midwife, the scenarios raise the same bioethical and philosophical questions about family and meaning in a world where suffering is a reality for all people, but is especially horrifying for children. 

Is a life of poverty, a life without married biological parents in a position to claim you and financially support you, a life with the possibility of hereditary disease, worth living? The consensus across the Western and developed world seems to be “avoid it at all costs.” The lesson learned from the Kotobuki Maternity Home incident should have been better support for impoverished women and their children. Legalizing abortion didn’t solve that problem in Japan–it merely buried it, just as the undertaker buried the cremated bodies in an unmarked grave.

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