Unloving Mothers: Jesuit Knowledge Production on Abortion and Infanticide in Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*

This article analyses the references to local practices of abortion and infanticide by the Japanese mission of the Society of Jesus between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, as a case study of Jesuit knowledge production on the country. Albeit described as common, allusions to such condemned practices in Jesuit literature were scant. This article dissects them to understand how the missionaries perceived these practices, and how and why they identified different causes in the narratives they sent to Europe, of socio-economic and religious natures. It then illustrates the European-Catholic background and practical reasons why such Jesuit narratives coalesced, first, in a depiction of Japanese mothers as unable to love, and then as embodying wrong practices of love for their children.