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I thought you could say "I was left alone after my friend passed" or something. It doesn't mean my friend left me purposefully but rather I was just alone after he died
It's about the framing. The focus is on the baby being "left alone," with passive language implying that somebody did that to them. Meanwhile, the mother's death is treated as an afterthought, only relevant as a circumstance in the baby's story.
I think you can say that someone was "left alone" without any implication that it was done to them, just that it merely happened.
It doesn't imply that somebody did it to them. The baby was left alone by the circumnstances. It's kind of difficult to come up with as short a sentence that is reasonably possible to read without somehow using 'left alone' in it.
"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.
"left" is used all the time where no one was purposely doing anything. It doesn't imply that at all.
No, it does imply that. Completely and directly. Your obstinance does not make you correct.
A baby does not have agency of its own. If I 'left my keys on the counter', you SHOULD assume someone put them there, because they didn't fucking climb up there themselves. That's how reality works, let alone the English language...
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.
I don't think the original wording implies that at all. This is a meaning OP and others are inferring themselves.
"A baby was found alone days after its mother died."
It's truly not that difficult at all.
Was the baby dead? In trying to edit out the word 'rescue' you've left a key detail ambiguous.
You refered to a human as "it", because you didn't want to say "baby" twice but the details didn't include a gender and that sentence structure didn't provide a good way to just refer to the baby once. This is commonly considered pretty dehumanizing choice of pronoun. I'd argue this is much more likely to offend people.
All this to avoid some imagined implied slight by the choice of the phrase "left alone" when there's no whiff that the subject of the verb would be the mother.
There was some eagerness to find offence at a really innocuous headline, but really it's quite a fairly straightforward headline that requires the reader to pretty much try to be offended by a particular reading of what most would consider an innocuous phrase.
Oh even better: "Baby rescued days after mother died"
So easy.
Though it does omit the detail about the baby being alone since the death. As written that could refer to just a very unfortunate family where the mother died, and then while the tragedy of the mother's death was fresh the family dealt with a separate tragedy that came close to killing the child.
Including the "alone" is pretty pertinent for the general picture.
And this entire incident is after someone managed to take offense at the concept of a baby "left alone" by a death as somehow accusatory toward the mother, which is far from a concept that I would have read into that headline.
Remember, the gripe being expressed here is that "left alone" is the action being described. You're claiming that it's hard to include all the same details without including that phrase, so let's really re-write it with the exact same details so you can see how simple it is to just change the action:
A baby was found alone after days in a Phoenix, Arizona, apartment and was rescued by police officers last month after the infants mother had died, officials said Friday.
And all that can be covered in additional phrasing, but still leads with the death of the mother instead of a baby being left alone.
Get it yet?
Well yeah, it's not newsworthy that a random person died. The newsworthy part is 'holy shit this baby lived somehow.'
Yes. Because people who read local news stories tend to care more about infants than adults.
Yes. Because old people who
read local news storiesare mindlessly anti-choice tend to care more about infants than adults.FTFY
This was a living infant that in all likelihood the mother wanted to live. Celebrating its survival seems hardy "anti-choice", even as the mother met a tragic end.
These mouth breathers call themselves "Pro-life" and all they care about is getting babies born. They couldn't give a crap if the kid is living well after that. And they certainly don't give a flying fuck about the mother. Otherwise they wouldn't elect assholes who promise to cut low income benefits and free school lunch programs. They believe that being against abortion will get them into heaven and that's is all they really care about. That and growing their insane death cult membership rolls.
But what do those people you call out have to do with this story? There's no details one way or the other for the most part.
There's no evidence that she was forced to have the child against her will.
There's no evidence that it was apparent that she was in particular need of support, no evidence she was kicked out prematurely from the hospital, and no statement about whether the cause of death even relates to having given birth.
There's no evidence that the life of the infant was in any way prioritized over the life of the mother, the mother was already dead.
Maybe one of these will turn out to be the case, but at the moment it's a bit presumptious to state this relates.
Also, a close call with death is generally more novel than dying.