1. He was in a state of grief. What is weird in a normal state didn’t seem weird at the time. And there’s the expectation or promise of “bringing the baby home”. He did. It was just dead.
2. The “reborn” babies seem weirder to me, making dolls of the dead kids.
3. The women who make baby dolls and then treat them as real babies is frankly way crazier. Babying dogs is only slightly less crazy.
The part about women treating baby dolls as real babies maybe has more meaning than we can realize. It’s possible that these women have lost children when they were small, or the worst case scenario, they may have had abortions and are trying to relive having a live child. I know a woman whose grown child had died two years earlier suddenly and she wanted to have a baby doll, one of the ones that looks like a real baby. And my aunt lost 3 grown children from juvenile diabetes, and she got a baby doll. I don’t think she plays with it, but it must be some sort of comfort to have the doll substitutes.