AFAIK, this is still the case in the Eastern Catholic Churches.
My feeling is that if we regard baptism and all of the sacraments as objective realities that do real things, even working in a child who is too young to know about it, this problem will be easier to handle. Who knows how baptism - and later knowing that he has been baptized - will help that child survive a very difficult family situation?
My own baptism bears this out.
Yes, I think many people can share that experience. I knew someone who was baptized by a nurse just after birth, because she wasn’t expected to survive and the nurse knew that the parents (who were already separated) would not have her baptized. The mother was not Catholic and was very hostile to Christianity in general.
The girl survived, but had a very difficult childhood because of her family situation. Strangely enough, she had always been attracted to the Church, and one time when her mother was angry with her, she indignantly told the girl that she had found out that the nurse had baptized the girl while in the hospital. That turned out to be a great comfort to the girl! A few years later she was conditionally baptized into the Church and her life was very different from that of her bitter, lonely mother.