(Interviews forthcoming, as always).

I'm a little late coming to this but of course the scandale rocking the blogosphere lately is that of Beccah Beushausen, who started a blog, saying that she was giving birth to a child diagnosed as terminally ill in the womb. Lots of people, including anti-abortion activists, followed her avidly and even sent her donations.

This was all made up, however, and when she took a picture of herself and her "dead baby" that she "gave birth" to, people figured it out and she was exposed and people got mad.

What I don't understand is why Beccah decided to kill off her baby so soon. Was she really desperate for immediate attention and sympathy? Or was she just already sick of her fake baby? Because if she were smart, she could have dragged this fake kids' life out for a much longer time and made way more money off it and probably gotten a better book deal out of it down the line.

I'm not even going to touch the issue that this fake baby would have been born with special needs, although that is neatly how she had it set up, which would have been money in her moneybank. If she had just avoided posing with a dumb baby doll, she could have given birth to this baby and then blogged about all the difficulties of being a single Christian young mother raising her baby, and I'm sure the sympathy (and cashola) would have rolled in. And why stop there? I bet people would have offered donations for baby April's vaccinations, her preschool, her clothes (which Beccah could have just sold maybe to a resale shop), her books, her haircuts, her grade school, her school uniforms, and so on. You see where I'm going with this? Wouldn't you have loved to hear the story of baby April growing up into a surly teenager, learning how to drive, making her poor mother go insane with her insolence? I think it would be hilarious to blog about a fake kid's volleyball match and parent-teacher conferences and so on. I'm mad at Beccah for screwing up what could have been a much more lucrative and truly awful/wonderful hoax so early on. If she had just stuck with it she could have seen baby April straight through to college and maybe her own wedding.

I am a bad person and am not really that invested in the lives of strangers' babies (unless they are in an impoverished country where the parents would sooner eat a laptop than use it to write a blog about their baby) so I personally was more angry at Beccah for aborting (no pun intended) her Internet hoax so early than for any fakery. At the very least she could have tried to fight back and say how dare you say my dead baby looks like a doll you horrible monster and then rake in the sympathy points.

Ladies, if you're going to give birth to a fake baby online, do the right thing and see that baby off to college. Don't end its life and then when faced with the consequences remove your blog and Facebook and Twitter pages. That's the coward's way out.