Birthing the Future: A Precautionary Tale

This post wrote itself this afternoon. I thought twice about sending it. In fact, I thought many, many times. Is it upsetting? Yes, definitely. Is it shocking? For sure. But is it where we may be headed if we don’t start taking action to protect our rights? You bet it is! As scary as this may be, it is the natural next step to total government control and ownership of ours and our children’s bodies. There is NOTHING those in power won’t stop at.

She had done this all before. At least 3 times that she could remember though the drugs they gave her after giving birth seemed to alter her memories or wipe them almost completely. But she knew she’d been there before and had learned to listen closely to the instructions of the midwife bots.

Machines beeped comfortingly around her, monitoring the baby’s heartbeat and vital signs as well as her own. That was good.

The pains intensified, rippling across her abdomen, awakening a primal need to push and push hard.

“I have to push!” She called out but the midwife bot assured her it wasn’t yet time, so she tried her hardest to resist the need crying out through her whole being.

Thankfully, on her next contraction, the bot called out – “Push NOW” – and push she did! First the head, then the shoulders, then the rest of the baby came rushing out – anxious to meet the world. Totally unaware of what awaited him or her there.

Totally exhausted, she fell back against the pillow on the bed, trying to find a comfortable position where the chains around her ankles wouldn’t be digging into the back of her legs.

“Is it a boy or a girl?”, she asked the bot. “Is it healthy?”

The bot ignored her – she felt a strange sense of Déjà vu – this had happened before, hadn’t it?

The bot cut the umbilical cord and said to her, “We will wait 15 minutes for the injection to work and then, you will deliver the afterbirth.”

“Can you loosen the cuffs? It’s really hard to get comfortable.” She implored.

The bot moved her legs and loosened the cuffs a turn or two and she sighed with relief, settling into the bed and starting to relax. She watched the bot expertly place a clamp on the baby’s cord, weigh and swaddled the child and then, go off to fill out the charts.

As she started to drift off to sleep, knowing that the drugs she had been given were not just to help her deliver the afterbirth more quickly but also to dull her senses so she wouldn’t feel, wouldn’t ask questions, wouldn’t wonder where her child was going or whom it was going to, she suddenly remembered.

The lines of other women in the facility – living in close quarters but not allowed to speak to each other. Weeing into a cup every morning to test where she was in her fertility cycle. Spending endless days after insemination waiting to find out if she had gotten pregnant this time.

Then, once she was determined to have ‘taken’, moving to a private room where she was given special rations and weighed and tested daily.

 She was all alone with only the television and a daily government-approved newspaper to keep her company. The constant message in both – along with the wars that always seemed to be brewing and the natural disasters happening with eerie regularity – was the daily record of births. Each one counted because these were all the government’s children.

The world leader celebrated when birth numbers were up and berated the population when they ticked down, by even a small fraction.

These children would be assigned various roles as they grew up under the care of the nanny-bots.

The prettiest ones would go to the sex farms where they would ‘service’ the elite in government and those in the corporate world who had done favours for the powerful.

The smart ones would go to the corporations where they would live lives of relative ease as long as they fulfilled their roles and were productive.

The strong ones did manual labour that was too intricate or difficult for the bots to achieve. Technology was advancing quickly however and it was thought that before too many more years had passed, these would no longer be needed.

And the brood women – like her – would be used to produce the babies until they were no longer fertile.

Anyone who didn’t fall into any of these categories would be considered excess to needs and would be liquidated. As would the pretty, the smart the strong and the breeders — once they were no longer of use to the government.

She remembered hearing, when she was very young, about a time when the world wasn’t like this. When people were free to move, think and act without control. When they kept their babies with them and raised them to adulthood. But she didn’t actually believe those tales. She’d never known a mother or a father nor could she remember anyone who cared for her. Only the bots who ensured she was cleaned, fed, and given a basic education.

She started to roll over onto her side and realised through the haze that she was still chained to the bed. A sound reached through her stupor. It was a baby crying! Her baby.

She looked up and saw the child lying on the scales – the bot was gone. 

Without thought, she sat up and pushed against the wall behind her, propelling her bed across the floor towards the child, lying loosely swaddled on the table.

Her bed slammed against the metal table – she hadn’t known she had that much strength!

She looked around guiltily, sure that the noise she had made would have brought the bots running, but there was nobody there.

She scooped up the helpless creature, interested to see it was a girl, and looked into her face, recognizing herself in the features. She had no idea who the father was since inseminators were never identified.

The girl gazed up at her mother with unfocused eyes and she could have sworn the child smiled but thought that couldn’t be possible. She bent over the baby’s thick, black hair, plastered to her scalp with blood and something whitish and breathed in the scent. Her heart, that had never before known love, swelled with an overwhelming feeling of protectiveness and something else she couldn’t quite describe. Whatever it was, it was fierce!

Her mind raced. She knew that their time was short. She frantically searched for a way to get out of the cuffs around her ankles but they were made of some hard and shiny metal and there was no way to cut them. They were too tight to wriggle out of.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, she remembered her life so far – the years she had been held at the facility before her path had been chosen for her. The misery of every day since she’d been selected as a breeder.

Looking down at the helpless creature in her arms – her child, her baby – and knowing that she was powerless to help her live a better life; that she would never see her again once the bots took her and her fate might be even more helpless than her mother’s had been was more than she could bear.

Choking back a sob, she saw that the bot had left the scissors used to cut the umbilical cord on the table. Without thinking, she grabbed them and swiftly cut the throat of the child, hoping she hadn’t felt too much pain. Then, just as she heard the bot come back into the room, she plunged the blades into her own chest, seeing the bot hitting the alarm on the wall and rushing towards her, knowing the creature would be too late to do anything.

The last thing she heard before blackness overcame her was a crew of revival-bots entering her room. They would try to save her and the child, but even though this was the first independent act she had ever carried, to the best of her knowledge, she had done it well. Her pride in escaping with her daughter filled her as her blood flowed away along with her spirit – finally free.

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