When a mother cannot reasonably expect her baby to live, the intense early attachment we treat as natural is weakened and delayed. The familiar idea of instant, biologically fixed bonding belongs to societies where women have few children and can expect to raise each one to adulthood. Love may have a biological root, but how it shows itself is shaped by economic conditions and backed up by cultural beliefs.
Where young lives are already fragile, a mother's emotional distance from a weak baby lowers its chances further. More deaths lead to more births, and more births to more deaths, so high death rates and high birth rates feed each other. The cycle is a response to harsh class relations and is unlikely to break without changing those relations.
Mothers who feel powerless to stop the causes of death, and who know the warning signs well, end up favoring the babies who seem strong and to have a taste for life. Those who seem to lack the will to live are allowed to slip away with little grief. What looks like indifference is not hidden mourning but a strategy for surviving repeated loss.
Falling child death rates can pile up among the poor while the better-off reach rates like those of rich nations. One country then holds two health profiles, as if history forked: some get modern lifespans, the rest keep dying of sickness, hunger and neglect. The new killers are poverty itself, such as malnutrition and dehydration from diarrhea linked to bottle-feeding.
Quick medical fixes can save a sick child today but cannot stop the illness coming back if living conditions stay the same. The real fault for these deaths lies with a society, its state and its churches, that tolerates them or looks away. That everyday violence ends up written on the bodies of the poor.