Today, young women who find themselves pregnant face a similar stark choice, as mothers of preemies did back then: they're given the choice of either Abortion, or Abandonment in state institutions, both of which dehumanize the lost children.
Adoption of children faces the same cultural ambivalence that preemies and slaves faced historically, even though there are millions of adoptive parents who wait years for a child!
In my province of Canada, the number of adopted infants is in the single digits, while thousands of families wait for years without a child, and thousands of babies are aborted -- and the mother is never given the choice to allow the child to grow up in a loving family...
Perhaps we can make the loss and abandonment of children as unthinkable as slavery and discarding preemies to die was!