Your post was excellent. However, I have to point out that your equivalency here is incorrect. The low life expectancy was (as the source you cited pointed out) because of the huge prevalence of childhood death. If you made it to 21, your life expectancy wasn't too far behind ours today.
@Suppressed @musiclady Making it to 21 meant, of course, you had done things most 30 year-olds haven't today, and taken those physical risks without the assistance of antibiotics to keep you from dying of infection or the benefits of considerably better medical care today. Between vaccines and antibiotics (keep in mind the real jump in life expectancy occurs after WWII), more than three decades have been added, on average.
But I would also opine that in an era when life was so easy to lose, it was valued all the more, and that cultural influence (that recognition that life was, indeed, fragile and precious), was ingrained in those families who lost children at an early age. Today that gift is taken for granted to a great degree in our society. How is that reflected?
Of course, the modern life expectancy figures do not include those who never made it out of the womb in one piece because of abortion. If you factor those 50 + million in since
Roe at zero, I think the numbers would shift. Whether you would count these as nonviable or just DOA, those deaths are not factored in.
We have reached the era when the single greatest threat to a child's life is not disease, guns, terrorists, or accident, but its mother.