this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
658 points (92.1% liked)
childfree
2434 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Kind of difficult"
I'm not a native English speaker and I can easily come up with many alternatives that don't imply the baby was left alone purposely.
I don't think the original wording implies that at all. This is a meaning OP and others are inferring themselves.
"left" is used all the time where no one was purposely doing anything. It doesn't imply that at all.
My friend's death from COVID left me saddened.
So you are saying my friend acted with some agency to make me sad in that sentence? The subject of "left alone" is unspecified but a very normal reading is that just the general situation left the baby alone, or maybe left alone by all of society. It's a pretty tortured reading to declare that the mother was intended to be the subject to that verb.