I once read that something like 4% of all the people who ever lived were still alive.

The numbers were never good for this child.

And it could be as something as simple as running out of firewood or coal, potable water or simply food stocks (e.g. poor harvests, or the only family dairy cow's or pig's death), poor insulation or exposure in either extreme heat or cold, and living a fair distance from your neighbours, over and above the limitations of infant delivery two hundred and fifty years ago, complications during birth for mother and/or child, and lack of antibiotics and what we would consider modern medical treatment.

My great-aunt (my Nan's little sister, who was born and died when my Nan was a toddler) did not survive her mother's childbirth, because the medical technology available would have very likely left my great-grandmother to bleed to death due to complications during her labour. And this was a little over a century ago, in the 1910s. Since my great-grandmother (whom I was fortunate lived long enough for us to meet during our lifetimes' overlap) had a family and home to support, the choice was made deliberately to induce spontaneous miscarriage of her child without intent or expectation of survival for my great-aunt.

Was there a moral choice made there? Certainly. I posit no intimation that my great-grandmother didn't want her daughter to have survived, but as one of two breadwinners in a working-class/labourer family around World War I, having her pass would've done considerably worse harm to the well-being of her surviving family and the future of the family I know today, than letting her hypothetical daughter pass on, which they chose.

A lot of American and Canadian Colonial homesteads going back as far as the middle of the 18th Century or earlier, even if they were considered part of a particular settlement (and I am of the understanding that Providence, Rhode Island would've been incorporate well before 1768), would still be miles or more between living quarters, as in the homes in which each family lived. Eastern Seaboard winters (which would include RI) have always been rough, and even when it's not bitter cold the Maritime rains can be considerable; enough that if a tiny infant was chilled or wet to chilled and wasn't warmed up by a heat source with care, it would be as likely for the child to perish from pneumonia or the like, a tiny, vulnerable body like that.

In the wintertime, you wouldn't be going out to greet your farming neighbours or check on their well-being by any habit if they were twenty miles of heavy snow and cold away. Not infrequently, if a family 'out in the boonies' ran out of food, or a disease got in and killed them all, the deceased family and their corpses would only be located once the weather improved, potential weeks or months afterwards, and it was clear there had been no sightings or word of them for quite some time (and none by the time spring came).

2Paw.