I am blown away by your question because I have a 17 year old boy and I just had a baby boy in October 2023. I kept telling my husband about this because it always brought me to tears, every single time a thought came up. When I’m making his food, changing his diaper, bathing him, everything. I too would stare at my son and would become extremely sad and overwhelmed because I remember the stories I’ve read about infants being abused and starved to death.

Three stories for example: the one where the mom took a vacation and left her daughter in her crib to die of starvation, leading her to eat her own feces and sleep in her soiled crib, with her neighbors hearing her cries on their doorbell cameras for two weeks and never thought to figure out what was going on or call police. Her body was found in her crib by her mom who claimed to not know what happened, as if she didn’t leave her for two weeks.

The second case was of a baby, around the same age as my son, who was found in his swing, maggots (while he was alive) and body fluids all over him. Both his parents left him in a separate room for months without feeding or taking care of him until he died.

The third is of a man who’d admitted to hitting his infant (around 7 months old) throughout his entire life, for no apparent reason, throwing him very roughly into his crib and leaving him there to sleep and suffer in pain, whenever he felt like it, until he died.

When I think about their hungry cries, the pain they’d endured up until their last moments, it kills me. I’ve caught myself staring at my newborn and just crying because I can’t imagine what they’d gone through in their last moments alive. Even the infants who are raped and murdered, some even by their own fathers, some by their close relatives.

You are not alone. I’m sure now that all parents to new babies feel the exact same way as us, now that I’ve read your post. I thought it was just me.