Chapter XXXI.
How Midwives, if they are Witches, Kill the
Children they Deliver.
Bodin, Demonom. IV. 6.In the ninth place, those midwives and wise women who are witches are in the habit of offering to Satan the little children which they deliver, and then of killing them, before they have been baptised, by thrusting a large pin into their brains. Sprenger, II. 1. 13.There have been those who have confessed to having killed more than forty children in this way.
They do even worse; for they kill them while they are yet in their mothers’ wombs. This practice is common to all witches, as we find in Nider, who writes that one named Stadlin in the Diocese of Lausanne confessed that he had killed seven children in their mothers’ womb by means of an animal which he had buried under the threshold of the house. Parent witches do not spare even their own children; Bodin, Demonom. II. 5.for we read of a Baron of Rays who, after having confessed to the murder of eight children, added that he wished to kill in its mother’s womb the ninth, which was his own son, and to sacrifice it to the Devil.
I do not doubt that this is done at the suggestion of the Devil; for he generally demands their children from parents who are witches, as he did from Groz-Jacques, from whom he demanded one of his daughters. Pierre Vuillermoz also