Charlie Gard is incurably brain-damaged, blind, deaf, cannot cry, and cannot move or breathe without help. At the request of his parents, he has been kept alive in hope of a minimal improvement.
Ancients did not feel about babies as we do. About one in three died within a month, and about half by the age of five. Putting disabled babies out to die was probably common. There are about 55,000 inscriptions on tombstones referring to ages at death, yet only a handful relate to those under six months. Few ancient authors describe babies behaving like babies; indeed, Latin had no specific word for ‘baby’. Cicero remarked that nature granted life on the same terms as one accepted a loan, and nature would call that loan in whenever it felt like it. If a small child died, it must be endured unemotionally; if a child was still in the cradle, ‘one must not even express regret’, however cruel nature had been, Cicero added.
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