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...

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago

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.