Grieving mothers adopt life-like dolls

Weighing five kilos (11 pounds), with perfectly combed hair and eyes closed in sleep, Abby looks like a baby girl. But she is a doll, adopted by a grieving mother to help come to terms with the loss of a child. "She reminds me of my daughter as an infant," said Eve Hasty, a 57-year-old American who bought Abby from a British company for 300 dollars (210 euros). The retired driver who lives in Oklahoma lost her daughter to leukaemia when she only seven. She has a surviving son in his 30s who has provided her with an eight-year-old granddaughter, but she finds the doll -- which she acquired in 2009, three decades after losing her daughter -- comforting. "I just get a type of serenity about me when I hold her, I change her clothes," she told AFP.   link