Chapter 4 focuses on childcare and adoption services, at this time a motley array of provisions that included long- and short-term supervision by impoverished private entrepreneurs, whose negligence or callous calculation, in a few proven cases, resulted in infant deaths. Despite the public’s strength of feeling on the issue, neither the authorities nor the medical press were ever able to demonstrate the existence of neglect or infanticide on a systemic scale. Undeterred, undercover journalists conducted lurid and manipulative investigations into so-called baby farmers and abortionists that effectively created their own discursive object of enquiry. Tracing this development, we show how investigative journalism harnessed popular outrage and a spirit of vigilantism to call for greater state regulation. This investigative context is crucial to understanding the force of George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), in whose climactic scene the heroine refuses a baby-farmer’s offer to dispose of her illegitimate child.