The Measles-Stricken Mother Who Lost Her Newborn Son

When the Amish man emerged from his barn to greet me, he had no idea that his newborn son’s death had become national news.

The man wore a straw hat, black trousers, and suspenders over a long-sleeved blue shirt; one of his similarly dressed sons was guiding a horse-drawn plow in a nearby field.

The man told me that, like most Amish people, he and his family don’t watch TV or use the internet.

They don’t read the newspaper either.

So they didn’t know until I told them that last Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, held a press conference to announce the first two “measles-associated” deaths in the state in 35 years.

Both of the people who died were from Lancaster County, which is home to the largest Amish community in the country and has been hardest hit by the state’s months-long measles outbreak.

They also didn’t know that Shapiro’s political opponents are accusing him of using the deaths to score political points, or that the county’s coroner later told reporters that his office had performed an autopsy on an infant who tested positive for measles but that the cause of death had been a ruptured spleen.

The confusion led Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, to mock Shapiro on X, calling his press conference “unseemly” and an example of “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.” Without evidence, Kennedy wrote that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” The Amish man asked me not to reveal his and his family’s names or exactly where they live, to protect the family’s privacy.

His son has not been publicly identified as the newborn whose death has been the subject of so much controversy.

But the circumstances of the death match, and when I told him about the case that had made the news, he said it sounded like his son.

When I ran the family’s biographical details past the Lancaster County coroner, Stephen Diamantoni, he said that the office was not currently investigating any additional infant deaths in the area.

When further pressed, Diamantoni said he could neither confirm nor deny the identity of the child whose death his office was investigating.

The story the baby’s father told me filled in many details missing from the accounts of both the coroner and the state.