“…the more the children of the better-off were cherished, and pampered, the worse the treatment of the children of the poor appeared to be”

If Victorian- and Progressive-era middle-class moralists were newly concerned about the dead and dying babies of the poor, it was partly because their own babies were, for the first time, not dying. And the more the children of the better-off were cherished, and pampered, the worse the treatment of the children of the poor appeared to be.

Jill Lepore, “Baby Doe”, The New Yorker (1 February 2016), 50.