Women worldwide are being used as human incubators, the bonds and significance of gestational motherhood reduced to functions of capitalism or even erased. Big Tech and other corporations encourage women to freeze their eggs, putting motherhood on ice (a move heartily endorsed by the fertility industry on whom this “choice” renders them dependent). While this description might appear to resemble a dystopian warning more than an accurate description of the society we inhabit today, a constellation of recent developments in medical research and technology has shocking implications: the science fiction of large-scale human manufacturing is a theoretical and potentially imminent possibility.Īs to objections that sheer repugnance at the idea of laboratory grown children will be enough to deter any impetus in that direction, consider the ways in which the fertility industry has already reshaped our ideas of human reproduction.

It might be the plot of a dystopian novel, but in the nearly 100 years since the publication of Brave New World, the details of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia have inched their way out of the realm of science fiction and into our headlines. Reproduction has moved to the laboratory: new generations are genetically engineered into varying social classes and are industrially grown. The government indoctrinates and raises our children, and it keeps the population subdued through widespread state-sanctioned drug use. The family has been dismantled, monogamy is reviled, and promiscuity is the norm.

A brave new world book