Well, this is one of the creepiest things I've seen lately

[layla]

It took me a while to figure out if this website was a joke or not. (I'm pretty sure it's real. But still not 100% convinced.)

http://www.homestead.com/godslittleones/micropreemies.html

They're pro-life "micropreemie" (a.k.a. fetus) dolls. Now, regardless of where you stand on the whole issue of whether life begins at birth, conception, quickening or wherever, I don't think anyone can deny that the human fetus, baby or not, is really freaking creepy looking. It trips our whole sense of "human, but not quite human, AAIIEEE!" And thumb-sized plastic fetuses dressed in baby clothes are, frankly, about ten times as creepy-looking as they would be in their natural environment.

Here's the main page, FYI.

Comments

[its-a-nono.livejournal.com]

Wow, that site is...I dunno, I think seeing a fetus at various gestations is interesting. Having just had a baby myself (very, very luckily, she was late, not early) I tracked the progress of my little one all the way and loved imagining her at six weeks and on, so tiny but already human looking. I only was bothered by the idea of dressing any of the pre-21 wk babies. It's amazing and wonderful how modern medical science has been able to sustain premature babies and help them not only survive but thrive, but slapping a hat on an eight-week-old fetus is...it's disturbing to me. No eight week old baby is going to survive outside the womb long enough to wear a hat. It adds a repressive religious overtone (God doesn't want to see even a fetus naked!) that takes the idea from being sweet to creepy. Well....it was interesting to see, but I share j_luc_pitard's feelings on the matter.

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

See, that's the thing ... I find human development fascinating, and there was a photo feature in, where was it, Scientific American or National Geographic or something a few years ago that had pages and pages of big glossy pictures of living fetuses taken at various stages of development with a little microcamera inside a woman's body -- that was COOL.

This is more like the fetus equivalent of dogs playing poker ... with the addition of freaky religious overtones and the idea that the person who runs the site apparently thinks that they're saving babies by doing it. (Also, the mention that the dolls are based on actual fetuses, not fetuses in general but SPECIFIC ones ... this is particularly bizarre and disturbing in the case of the littlest ones, because -- okay, I've never seen a human miscarriage, but growing up on a farm, I've seen very premature animal fetuses, and EWW. Cute inside the body; not nearly so cute outside the body.)

[its-a-nono.livejournal.com]

Well put. I was chatting with my friend about it yesterday, and I pinned down what was bothering me so much about the hats/blankets. I think that it was the knowledge that any baby wearing a hat is not in a womb, and any baby that tiny not in the womb is a dead baby. So it was like looking at dolls of dead babies. *shudder.* I'm sure that lady meant well, but I think she missed the mark...