Then there were no decent people in western civilization, since culture was generally blind to children's welfare and glad to let orphans die. Case in point, child industrial labor, and the children's welfare movement only followed the animal welfare movement, once someone noticed that maybe if animals should be treated well, so should human spawn.

If you want to toss away all of western civilization because they didn't recognized the interests of kids... I say you go! The same institutions give no fucks about the current future of humanity, hence the climate crisis and the minimal response to it, and countless other contamination crises they could have prevented but didn't.