Baby Face

            Can you think of any new parent that would call their baby ugly? Because I couldn’t, that is until my American Studies class last week. We read a paper in which a mother said she thought her newborn daughter was hideous when the doctor gave her the baby for the first time.

Personally, I always thought parents were programmed to think their child was beautiful. But apparently a parent doesn’t have to think that highly of their kid. I recently read an article where a man sued his wife for having an ugly baby. He sued on the grounds that she had plastic surgery before he met her, so he never knew how ugly she was. Shockingly, the judge agreed that this baby girl was, in fact, ugly and that it was the mother’s fault. She had to pay the husband $120,000 for having an ugly baby.

            I was astounded in class when we read that the mother thought her child was hideous. I was even more disgusted to hear that a man would go as far as suing his wife for having a baby that he thought was ugly. If people are this harsh towards the looks of their own babies, what does it say about our society as a whole? I think that people are becoming too obsessed with appearances instead of focusing someone’s personality. In this case, the man didn’t even stick around long enough to get to know his daughter; he took one look at her and ran for a lawyer.