[croissants]

I think a modern USA 1 year old has about a 99.97% chance of making it to adulthood. That means that if a modern USA adult loses a young child, there's a decent chance they don't know anybody who has had that experience.

The ancient (and even, as you point out, very slightly pre-modern) world had a lot of "infrastructure" in place to deal with this, there were rituals and ceremonies and familiar people who knew what you were going through, and most of that is gone now.

It is indeed an enormous change.

[Syonyk]

It's not gone. It's just less common, and, at least in my experience, hidden inside churches where people are open about this sort of thing, and where, in a lot of them, miscarriages are treated as much the same thing, to be grieved over, as loss. Sometimes in private, but it's better when it's shared, because others have gone through the same thing, suffering silently.

But you're right, it's far harder to go through an experience alone, and loss of a child has certainly become far, far less common than it used to be. At least, if you limit it to the born.

In the US, in 2023, 1 in 3 never made it to birth.