Hi, I'm a new member. I have a strange phobia that doesn't seem to
have been mentioned yet here or on the website. I get royally
creeped out when I see a photo or worse yet video footage of a human
fetus. This stems from a commercial that traumatized me when I was a
kid back in the 80s. You may remember this infamous shocker, it was
an anti-smoking public service announcement warning expecting
mothers not to smoke. We slowly zoom in on a life-like computer
animated fetus, while an eerie, slow version of "Also Spake
Zarathustra" plays in the background, and an eerily sensual female
voiceover asks, "Would you give a cigarette to you unborn child?".
Then we slowly pan to the baby's left, revealing its tiny left fist
clutching a cigarette, putting it to its mouth to take a drag. The
smoke looked thin, sharp and much wispier than real cigarette smoke,
somehow adding to the eeriness. The voiceover continues "You do...
If you smoke during pregancy." This ad actually got so many
complaints that it soon got yanked off the air. I seriously had many
nightmares about this commercial, and just an image of a human fetus
makes my heart race andI break out in a cold sweat, to this day. I
had an incident a couple years ago, where I was driving downtown,
and passed some pro-life protestors, carrying signs with pictures of
dead fetuses on them, and I came really close to crashing my car. I
had to pull over until I stopped hyperventilating. It may be the
eerie mysteries of life in utero my fear is based on, but it was
that damn commercial I saw at a rather early age that turned it into
an intense phobia. I call it fetophobia.