I am currently doing some research on infant baptism and infant mortality in antiquity. This is important for Moroni 8 and the practice in Mesoamerica. Here are some important excerpts from a work on the archaeology of infants and infant mortality:
Infant mortality rates therefore
differ markedly throughout the world and are affected by a variety of cultural
and environmental factors. Not all these factors are necessarily couched within
the arena of the western medicalization of childbirth. In the developing world
one of the main killers of newborn babies is the coercion of their mothers into
using formula rather than breast milk. Formula milk must be mixed with clean
water and served up in sterile bottles with sterile teats, or the baby runs the
risk of developing gastro-enteritis, a potentially fatal condition in infants.
As clean water and sterile conditions are difficult to obtain for many women in
developing countries, the result has been the deaths of millions of babies, at
infant mortality rates as high as 250+ per thousand lives births. The effects
of feeding methods on infant survival rates is often not fully appreciated.
Kevill-Davies’s observation that the Dublin Foundling Hospital which attempted
to hand-raise over ten thousand babies between the years 1775 and 1796 had only
45 successes—a 99.6 percent mortality rate—is relevant here (Havill-Davis 1991,
40). Prior to the advent of successful bottle feeing this century, infants
whose mothers had died and abandoned “foundling” infants required the attentions
of a “wet nurse”—a woman who could breastfeed the baby—if it were to stand any
chance of survival. (Eleanor Scott, The Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death
[BAR International Series 819; Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2016], 31)
However, irrespective of feeding
issues, a high mortality rate in antiquity and
prehistory is to be expected simply through disease and accident. What would be
considered a minor bout of diarrhea in an adult is frequently fatal in a small
baby. Colds and ever lead to overheating and are now known to be a significant
factor in cot death. Similarly, the newborn—especially those born prematurely—cannot
cope with cold temperatures, and its immature immune system does not deal
adequately with exposure to viruses and bacteria, and the infant can succumb to
all quickly to infection. Any congenital defect which would affect the ability to
feed, such as severe cleft palate or pyloric stenosis, might result in the
death of the infant by slow starvation. Accidents and predation can and do
happen. Infants are dropped, shaken, smothered, burnt and savaged by dogs,
their delicate tissues and skulls unable to survive even minor blows and
traumas. I has been estimated that infant mortality in prehistoric and
mediaeval Scandinavia may have been as high as 50% of all births (this would
include stillbirths) (Welinder 1979, 83; Wicker 1997, 12). (Eleanor Scott, The
Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death [BAR International Series 819; Oxford:
Bar Publishing, 2016], 31-32)