The story of Kira Cousins has wider implications in a society that persistently undermines women's health concerns, writes Herald columnist Marissa MacWhirter

My introduction to reborn dolls was accidental. It was a few years ago, and I was in the market for a domain so I could launch my own website, but when I typed Marissa May into the search bar, I discovered it was already taken.

I thought at first it might be the Marissa May who was on season 15 of The Bachelor and caused my Facebook to be inundated with friend requests in 2011, but got a jump scare when I opened a website dedicated to realistic baby dolls. It was a shopfront for “Fine Art Infant Sculpts and Limited Reproductions”. I was thrust headfirst into the uncanny valley.

The website is gone now, and all that is left of the About section in the Wayback Machine is a quote from W.B. Yeats: “I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world...."

The choice of quote is an interesting one. It implies that the hand-painted vinyl dolls with their hand-rooted hair are somehow a miniature, controllable world free from the ‘clumsiness’ that mars real babies. That they are somehow preferable, better even than actual babies.

When I first saw a picture of Bonnie-Leigh Joyce, I had to wonder if she was a Marissa May. Bonnie-Leigh is a reborn doll that Kira Cousins, 22, allegedly paraded around

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