The Foundling Hospital in London opened in 1739. A foundling hospital is a place where people, commonly mothers, would abandon their children when they were unable to take care of them. This was very common for women to try and do whenever the child had been born out of wedlock. The term foundling refers to an abandoned child, this is a devastating thought, but for many of the children, they would have better lives growing up not knowing their parents. If the child had been born out of wedlock there would've been great shame brought upon them, but through this hospital they could miss out on some of that. By the 19th century it became more difficult to have children born out of wedlock put into this foundling hospital, "The eighteenth-century petitions were very different documents from those of the nineteenth century in which a petitioner had to prove that she had been seduced after a promise of marriage, or raped, that this was her first child and that she always acted respectably before her pregnancy" (Evans). The demand for the hospital was so high in the beginning that in 1742 a lottery system was introduced to decide whether a child was to be admitted or denied. "Mothers wishing to bring in their children were asked to draw coloured balls from a bag. If they picked a white ball, their infant was provisionally admitted; if they picked a red one, they could wait and see if one of the infants already accepted turned out to be ineligible because of an infectious illness. A black ball meant outright rejection" (Banerjee). This was eventually abolished when the government offered grants and financial support. For a period of time every child was accepted, but this caused mass overcrowding, and was eventually stopped when the government grant ended. 

Sources: Evans, Tanya. “‘Unfortunate Objects’: London’s Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century.” Gender & History, vol. 17, no. 1, Apr. 2005, pp. 127–153. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.0953-5233.2005.00375.x.

Banerjee, Jacqueline. “Admission Procedures at the London Foundling Hospital.” Two. Admission Procedures at the London Foundling Hospital, www.victorianweb.org/history/orphanages/coram2.html.