Pregnancy Products!

"I don't like kids. Get this shit off my computer terminal." Hey, I don't really like kids either! They're mostly shit-idiots who give my healthy, smart child the common cold, plus a bunch of handrail-licking illnesses with names like "Parvovirus B19" or "Coxsackievirus A16." Kids are how people are made, but the entire process is an insane nightmare, from the horror of growing a person inside of your own uterus to the awful products that were designed to take advantage of your infant-addled brain!

Take, for example, the "belly painting kit." This allows people around you to prod and smear paint on your swollen, stretch-marked abdomen, while they take pictures and laugh at your disfigurement. The actual cost of a few jars of food-grade paint plus a sponge is maybe three bucks, but as a pregnant person, you can be precisely targeted with PREGNANCY PRODUCTS, allowing the manufacturer to mark it up to twenty bucks, or more, if you don't buy it online.

The belly-painting kit pales in comparison to the Pregnancy Belly Cast Kit, a way to preserve your body horror for eternity, or at least until your kid grows up enough to knock it on the floor.

You may be wondering "What is my child doing while I'm slathering myself with Vaseline and preparing to encase my impending motherhood in plaster?" If you've got the Nuvo Ritmo Pregnancy Sound System (yes, it's actually called that), then you can blast sick jams into your fetus from the outside. The manufacturer recommends recording your own voice, but the attentive mother-to-be will pick something to further the baby's education, like the soothing sounds of Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation.

Are there two competing brands of fetus-blaster? Yes, there are, and this one, the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System, has a couple dozen customer reviews that say it actually fucked up their baby. "Trauma device," warns one parent, which was disappointing to me, because I was hoping Trauma Device would be another death-metal album.

But enough about damaging your kid - how about killing pregnant women themselves? "Born In Zion" is a book that advocates for this very thing. Despite the fact that several women have died as a direct result of following the advice in this book, it continues to be published. While it's easy to shrug it off as a Darwinist "survival of the least insane" sort of thing, the unfortunate truth is that pregnant women in the kind of situation where they'd read a book like this don't have the education or agency to make an informed decision about their health. But that's the horror of pregnancy: Once you start growing a baby, you're not a person. You're a bus stop, a copy machine, a powerless object in the middle of a bunch of people who want to use you to get what they want, or make a point.

Shuffling off your mortal coil is one thing, but killing your dignity while remaining alive is a delicate task. The "Loading Baby" shirt does this pretty well, turning your body, and your developing baby, into a computer joke. But, as with any pit, a shovel is all you need to go deeper, and it's there we find the iron-on "Skeleton With Baby Skeleton" T-shirt transfer. Because nothing quite says indignity like "eh, we didn't want to bother ironing it onto a shirt ourselves."

Drew Fairweather is the author of three daily sites: The Worst Things for Sale, Toothpaste for Dinner, and Married to the Sea.

– Drew Fairweather (@drewtoothpaste)