The root cause of this and today’s abortion rate (which is even more tragic) is that these women were left alone to fend for themselves and baby and the father skipped out.
The problems haven’t changed, only the methods of dealing with it. Always was tragic.
New York City regularly suffered from all sorts of plagues. Sometimes things just overwhelmed the government and social welfare groups so they’d round up the surviving children and put them on trains to the Midwest called ‘Orphan Trains’