It all comes back to religion

It was really interesting to see how the story of the hog faced woman was treated and how it was framed. It did indeed have a sort of fairy tale quality about it (despite the less than happy ending) and it seemed to be treated as a curiosity for the sake of a curiosity. I found it in stark contrast to the monstrous baby pamphlets. In those, the monstrous birth is of course the subject of the pamphlet, but I found the focus was always on monstrous religion. Ultimately, the monstrous birth was just a means to single out and make a point of religious monstrosities of the time, particularly Catholicism and anti-Independents. And, more generally speaking, monstrous babies served as a curiosity of their own very rarely; they were almost always viewed as a sign of God's wrath towards the parents, England as a whole, humanity in general, etc., and never as just a strange happening.