That is the firs time I hear this. If baptism is only for the consequeces of ancestral sin, then why do we profess it in the Sybol of Faith as for the "remission of sins?"
Baptism has been likened by the Eatsern fathers as adoption. Without adoption, you don't belong to the Curch, you are not in Chirst, you are not a Christian, you are not a believer, you don't "rate" a Christian funaral.
Roman tombstones of their infants who were baptized read something like this: "Tiberius, six months old, a beliver." Now, an Orthodox priest can say prayers for someone who is not a Chriatian, but how can he give a non-Christian departed a Christian funeral?
In an infant, the only "sin" involved is the effect of the ancestral sin.
In someone of the age of reason, the baptism is for the removing of the effects of the ancestral sin *and* for the remission of sins committed by the person. Hence Ananias and his exhortation to St. Paul to "be baptized and wash away thy sins."
I'm repeating what I have been told. I'm not sure what the written guidelines of the Church say about all of this. It could be that I was being told something that is not traditional Orthodox practice.
I again find it unlikely that the Orthodox practice of a relatively late baptism would have developed had the parents known that their child would go without an Orthodox burial in the event of untimely death (which, up until very recent times, was a far from uncommon occurence.)
But maybe not. Regardless of what happens in funeral practices, I don't think that this would change Orthodox beliefs that all infants go to heaven -- which seems to be virtually universal in my own experience. Maybe I've just been around softies all these years.