“In the preindustrial world, infancy was heartbreakingly fragile. Families faced constant loss; many babies died from causes no one understood. Medical advice often made things worse, and religious or medical ideas sometimes blamed mothers or framed tragedy as moral failure. Out of that fear and pressure, some infants were neglected, abandoned, or killed— not because people were monsters, but because poverty, shame, and lack of options crushed them.
At the same time, early laws, juries, and communities were beginning, however unevenly, to treat infanticide as a social problem rather than pure evil, and to build institutions that could help. Looking back isn’t about judging people who had almost no safety net; it’s about seeing how far knowledge, public health, and compassion have moved us. That progress didn’t happen by magic. It came from learning, organizing, and refusing to accept needless loss as ‘just how life is.’”