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"I find no evidence that the Greco-Roman pagan tradition ever regarded the sufferings of small children as so problematic that moral-philosophical treatises were devoted to this question. On the contrary, writers such as Cicero and Seneca criticize parents and especially fathers for grieving over the deaths of their small children. As I noted in the previous chapter, our sources do not give an unambiguous answer to the question whether parents did, in fact, grieve over their dead babies, but the fact that representatives of the intellectual elite express the view that small children are nor worth their parent’s grief tells us clearly what kinds of reaction were regarded as conventional. This means that the church fathers apparently had a different attitude to the worth of babies than that found in the pagan moral-philosophical tradition. Although our sources are not explicit on this point, it is reasonable to believe that this positive assessment of the worth of babies is connected with the idea that all human beings, even small children, are created in the image of God. Whereas pagans thought that a newborn baby was not a human person in the full sense, patristic thinking implies that the newborn possesses the fullness of human dignity. I quote Cyprian’s words once more: “For what is lacking to him who has once been formed in the womb by the hands of God?” (Ep. 64:.2). This means that the newborn has a soul and can receive the gifts of divine salvation, and that the church is the instrument that it to mediate these gifts even to the smallest children. The idea that babies are created in God’s image, and hence are the recipients of divine salvation, thus leads to a focus on babies and an interest in them that unknown in pagan antiquity."
Child mortality