...the common people suffer.
"In the old days," said a priest in northern Brazil, some 14-odd years ago, "Child death was richly celebrated. But those were the baroque customs of a conservative church that wallowed in death and misery. The new church is a church of hope and joy. We no longer celebrate the death of child angels. We try to tell mothers that Jesus doesn't want all the dead babies they send him."
There is a place called Alto do Cruzeiro. The poverty there is difficult for me, a Yankee - a child of privilege, generally speaking, compared to so many others - to imagine. And I am going to write about that, this evening.
I believe a fair number of the people there live in rural areas, as laborers on plantations. They're paid not even beans, and they're treated like slaves. The women especially get the worst-paid jobs in the field, and as for the domestics, well... you see, there's no child care.
I don't mean this in the sense of no day care centers. I mean it in the sense that there's nobody to take care of a child once it's born and once the mother is physically capable of working. So, among the worst off, infants might be left to themselves for the whole workday, while their mothers are working their asses off to keep themselves in enough food to stay alive.
In such harsh conditions (for infants - let's assume the adults are okay, here), is it any wonder that infant mortality can be high? And as a result, a certain culture of stoicism developed among mothers. They had learned not to develop attachments to newborns, and to watch out for certain signs in the child that meant it was unwise to invest any hope.
If a baby was born pale or small or weak or quiet (instead of crying), they... let nature take its course. They didn't make a special effort to restore electrolytic balance. They didn't feed it, if it wouldn't eat on its own. They wouldn't do more than wrap it in a blanket and set it down, and "let nature take its course".
And if the baby developed "acute baby sickness", and began to scream and thrash violently and foam at the mouth, as its eyes rolled back in its head, then too, nature took its course - even more so. A baby like that was thought to be dangerous, there is something consuming it from the inside that changes its behavior, like rabies. You or I would know acute baby sickness as a grand mal seizure brought on by fever or dehydration, but they just took those factors for granted. With a baby that had acute baby sickness, you just set it down out of sight and left, quickly.
Now, it may sound to you that I am criticizing these people. I am not. This may be just and proper behavior for people who were (and in some cases are) so poor. It's a form of triage, one that's so unfamiliar to us, here in a country where we have overproduction of food per capita, if not necessarily the healthiest food around. For me to criticize these people would be like standing on a battlefield and criticizing the way the doctors decide who shall be operated on immediately, who shall be evacuated, who shall receive a bandage and be sent out to keep fighting, and who shall die on the spot because it would take more than the available three minutes to save his life. I can't do it.
But what struck me, in reading the stories from northern Brazil's poorest communities, was the role of the Church. You see, back in the day, when a child died - as so many did - you'd have a whole funeral, a coffin baptism perhaps if it hadn't been done earlier, you'd ring bells in a sort of celebration that an angel, having been sent into the world, was being allowed to return to Heaven. To some degree this was unavoidable, also, as the Church was firmly against all but one method of birth control, from contraception to abortion, except for one method of dubious effectiveness.
Later, the advent of a friendlier theology that focused on life here on this plane rather than the suffering of Christ, the terror of Hell and the promise of Heaven meant that it was no longer appropriate for area clergymen to participate in ceremonies of celebration of infants' deaths. Yet the opposition to birth control was not relaxed. So should an infant die, there will be no ceremony. Mothers of dying babies occasionally were shooed out and sent home to care for them, which they could not really afford to do.
So, to sum up, I can't blame them for neglecting infants like that, even though I don't like it. They're dirt poor. Their options are seriously limited. Yet Pope Panzer sits in Rome, as did his predecessor, and has the gall to lecture us, in religiously diverse rich countries, about the evils of abortion and the immorality of birth control, while he withdraws spiritual solace from people [thanks Tenn Wisc Dem] and otherwise lifts not a finger to improve the lot of Brazilian peasants, his own flock.
That's the pro-life ideology, in a nutshell.
Relevant reading: a Google search for "Alto do Cruzeiro".