That baby was one of the most hideous CGI things I have ever seen. I am not even one to carp about CGI, because even the really bad kind in SciFi channel creature features is still something I look upon as an improvement over cardboard cutouts and miniatures. But the eyes...it was what should not be.

On a related note, the clip I saw made reference to a pro-life message of the books/movies, and featured a couple of the baby-thing's aunts (are they really, or is that just vampire-relationship bullshit where they were born to way different people and just got bit by the same monster? ) arguing semantics about whether or not it was a baby or a fetus. So why am I not surprised that Stephanie Meyer completely missed the point? I've seen the issue come up elsewhere too, with women giving birth to aliens or demons or some other crap like that, which purport to show how misguided the "no abortion" issue is. So really, as tempting as it is to put this one on Meyer being Meyer, it seems to be a universal mental shortcoming of people who don't understand why we are opposed to abortion.

I am one of the most hardline pro-lifers I have seen express himself on this site. I interpret the pro-choice position to be "I wouldn't do it myself, but I can't speak for someone else or impose my conscience on them." And that's how I feel about killing abortion doctors. So my view here is not some watered-down, attempt to compromise or play nice. I don't care, really about abortion as such. I am opposed to it for the exact same reason I applauded Rand Paul's filibuster the other day: because murder is wrong. Murder specifically refers to, and only to, the unwarranted killing of HUMAN BEINGS. That's all there is to it. Abortion has nothing to do with sex or pregnancy or how cute babies are. It is entirely about the fetus being a human being, and not a monkey or a tadpole or whatever. I'm pretty much okay with killing anything that's NOT a human being, as long as you get permission if it has a legal owner, and even then I'm willing to make exception based on the volume, duration and lateness at night of its barking.

So you see where we're going here? Nooomi Rapeface can dramatically shriek out for an abortion when she's looking to get a xenomorph excised, but that is not going to push my buttons nearly as much Charlize Theron failing to grasp the concept of dodging slightly to one side. If it's anything OTHER than a human being in there, the woman's right to do what she pleases with her body takes precedence, although an exception can be made on the grounds that xenomorphs or demon-children are easier targets in a womb than skittering about on a bloody floor, so shut up and hold still, lady.

It's like when CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien try to illustrate the evils of deforestation by showing the anguish it causes the nymphs and the Ents, but all they are doing is creating a situation that bucks the rule. Killing trees in Narnia or Middle-Earth is bad because it kills a (maybe) person. There are not creepy magic people in the trees in the real world, so their hypothetical doesn't apply (also, if the trees ARE prone to come to life and do stuff in revenge for deforestation, I lean in favor of preemptive strikes, because they STILL are not humans, and since that's the hand I was dealt, that's the team I'm going to play for, all the way down the line). Similar issue with the X-men. Jews are pretty much people, just like everyone else, so genociding them is not cool. On the other hand, when a member of a despised minority can drop his sunglasses and almost kill everyone in a train station, maybe registration isn't the worst thing in the world.

So when it comes to babies that look like the thing in Twilight, I, speaking as someone who has marched on Washington over this issue, would gladly operate the vacuum cleaner already! Wake up, Meyer! Figure out the actual, you know, REASON for taking a position that is going to be the underlying theme of your bloated book series!

I am wondering now if I dodged a bullet though, when I chewed out one of my students for reading Twilight in class, back when I taught in a Catholic school. If the wrong parents heard I criticized pro-life literature... I kind of miss the good old days, when vampire romance novels featured Van Helsing making a point of the fact that he had a special dispensation to use consecrated Hosts against Dracula.

But seriously, WTF is wrong with that baby? Why would they put a thing like that in a teen romance fantasy? Are the producers trying to undermine the source material?