What's the Deal With Babies?

What is it about infants that make otherwise mature, rational, level-headed, intelligent grown women lose their minds and start cooing and speaking and squawking in baby-speak? It never fails, I’ll be talking with someone and someone else brings their freshly-squeezed child into the conversation, and the otherwise stoic person I was talking to will lose their damned minds. I’ve asked around, and the most common response is that babies “are cute”. This is debatable. Personally, I’ve never met a snot/puke/poop/tears sack that engendered feelings of cuteness to me. Puppies are cute. Kittens (not full-grown cats, those suck) are cute. Baby animals are cute. Human infants are bumbling sacks of redundant protoplasm and disease. And even if one could be called cute, I’ve never been in a group that has collectively halted just to admire a cute puppy. Why does it make it ok in society to do that for a child? In my experience, when a baby spawns in a workplace, all action stops and every female is drawn to the child as if they were caught in the singularity of a black hole. And for what purpose? To stare at the infant with adoration at its excellence in being alive? To congratulate the mother on being able to pump out a unit? To be involved in a collective primeval yearning for offspring? None of these options make sense. The whole thing doesn’t really make sense, but maybe it’s just me. I’m not too fond of children before they can rationalize their own arguments. I think people call those “teenagers”.