When Marty Mueller's baby was stillborn a few weeks before she was due to give birth, she and her husband spent several hours at the hospital, holding their son, grieving, and snapping photographs before sending him to the mortuary.

As the day wore on, Troy's skin became discolored, and the signs of decay were clearly visible in the developed pictures. So Marty, a professional photographer, did what came naturally to her: she re-touched the snapshots to make them look better, digitally creating the rosy-cheeked, healthy baby she never had.

She shared Troy's pictures at a bereavement group in Santa Cruz, California, and was soon besieged by requests from anguished parents asking her to retouch their stillborn photographs as well. Today, she has turned the requests into a sideline business, for which she suggests a donation of $30 to $50 per picture.

"It’s difficult for parents to share these pictures with people because many times the pictures are too gruesome and they don't want to shock anyone," Mueller said. "It's much easier to share pictures if it looks like normal baby."

Many of her clients, who hail from around the world, carry the photographs in their wallets or display them, portrait-style, in their homes.

While grieving parents have long shared pictures of their stillborn babies in support groups, and have recently created virtual memorials to their lost children on the Internet, doctoring the images and publicly exhibiting them is a relatively new phenomenon.

Parents who request the service say the touched-up photos help them deal with their devastating loss, but some experts fear that they may be avoiding reality.

"I keep a framed pictures of my daughter in my living room so everyone can see how beautiful she was," said Jennifer Johnstone, one of Mueller's clients who lost her baby at 35 weeks. (Babies are normally born 40 weeks from the mother's last menstrual period). "We have a 3-year-old son, who can look at this picture and say, "Hey, that's my baby sister, Madison. She's in heaven."

Jenese Parra only had one photo of her son Nathan – snapped by nursing staff after her full-term son was born lifeless at 39 weeks – and it was a lousy one. His skin was bruised and peeling badly.

"Even though I could look past that and see my son for what he really looked like, I knew others wouldn't look past it and wanted his photos retouched so (they) could see Nathan as I did," said Parra, who carries Mueller's picture of her son in her billfold and displays them in her house and in her work cubicle. "He looks just like a sleeping baby and it makes people more comfortable talking about it with me, which in turn makes me feel better because I can talk about it."

Historically, world cultures have treated stillborns as less-than-human tragedies that should be quickly disposed of and forgotten. In medieval Europe, for example, children who did not live long enough to be christened were not buried in hallowed ground, said Francesca Bray, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

But modern technologies such as ultrasounds have given expectant parents a deeper connection to their unborn child than ever before, revealing the fetus's sex, health and development mere weeks from conception.

"It seems to me the wish to make a true and memorable person of a stillborn connects to a completely new sense of connection that people now have to the fetus from very early in its existence," Bray said.

But one psychologist said that doctored photographs are a "step away from reality."

"It's unnatural," said Matt Zimmerman, a psychologist who specializes in loss. "It goes against the grain of what actually happened. How can you come to accept a loss if you're working towards pretending it didn't occur? This goes against my clinical experience and substantial research on grief."

But the photographers doctoring the images disagree.

"If you have a child that was lost at age 2 or 5 or 20 and you hung their picture on the living room wall, no one would say anything. What makes a stillborn less of a child?" asked Deanna Roy, an Austin photographer who has retouched over 100 pictures of stillborns. She does not charge her clients, who come to her by word-of-mouth.

Roy, who miscarried a baby at 5 months, still regrets having the baby surgically removed instead of delivering it and holding it in her arms. She says that giving other parents a memento of what they lost has helped alleviate her loss.

Her work is grueling – she spends two to four hours on each picture -– but she has yet to turn down a photograph, no matter how grisly. Some of the photographs she gets are of 20-week fetuses with transparent skin. Others are of babies that have been dead in the womb for so long that their facial features have dissolved, requiring her to redraw them.

"The fact that they're so gruesome is what motivates me to fix them," said Roy, who is so overwhelmed by requests that she asked that her website not be linked in this article.

When she e-mails the photos to her clients, she advises them to open the attachment in a quiet place, because they are frequently shaken by renewed anguish at seeing a reflection of what their baby would have looked like, had it lived.

For Hector Davila, who runs a photo restoration service at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles, most of his work focuses on prolonging the youth and beauty of Hollywood actors or restoring cracked snapshots from bygone eras.

The number of clients requesting photo touch-ups of stillborn babies has steadily grown in the past few years, he says.

"Stillborn babies are the hardest pictures I've worked on," said Davila, who set up a separate website for this niche market. "Try staring at one of those pictures for a couple of hours. It's almost like working in a funeral home. But it's the least I can do for the mothers of the world."

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