Rent-A-Womb

[Jeff Gerke]

There's a technothriller or SF story here, I can feel it, but I haven't quite been able to articulate it yet.

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,580956,00.html

It's a short article that says women in India will, for $3,000, receive implantation of a viable embryo (usually from a Western couple) and carry the baby until delivery, then hand the child over.

Rent-A-Womb

So what's the story? I know "aliens" sometimes claim they are impregnating human women and using them as surrogates for their mutant offspring.

What about this article feels so creepy?

Maybe it's fine and everything works beautifully, except the child grows up in Connecticut with an unexplained hankering for spicy Indian food.

Jeff

[dmgraham]

The first idea that enters my mind is the women in India are not willing. It is a slavery camp and the western couples have no idea they are being given an alien child. The alien must be hosted in a human body in order to build immunities and acclimatize to Earth. That is off the top of my head. ;D

The alien children grow, not knowing they are alien. Each being embedded with a tracking and control chip. When the aliens want to begin their takeover, they activate the chip. The story begins when several of the alien children revolt. They have found the Way and will risk dying to stay on the path of good.

[Jeff Gerke]

Awesome.

[torainfor]

See, my mind goes straight to a more "Handmaid's Tale"/near-future deal. So many of my friends are having problems conceiving and carrying, anyway. Before long, well-to-do Westerners won't get pregnant. It'll be gauche, like not having indoor plumbing. Maybe there will be a revolt in third-world countries--they'll hold the unborn babies hostage until America pays up.

[myrthman]

I saw an episode of Law and Order: SVU the other day dealing with this subject but on the homefront. An ambitious young scientist was taking troubled girls off the streets to further his research in human cloning. He fed the girls a line that they were helping a couple who had lost a baby to grow a clone of the child. In reality he was using his own sperm to artificially impregnate these girls and selling the child to the heartbroken parents, the money going to fund his ongoing research. Cool episode.

I also like the ideas presented above, especially torainfor's. Lots of possibilities here.

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EDIT: What if this is posted in the wrong board? What if it really belongs over in Demons, Monsters, and the Last Days because the not-so-good doctors, under the control of demonic spirits, are actually developing twins or triplets and giving only one child to the American parents? Why would they do this? To artificially enlarge the armies that will fight in the valley of Megiddo, of course.

[waldenwriter]

Dec 23, 2009 19:16:21 GMT -5 torainfor said:

See, my mind goes straight to a more "Handmaid's Tale"/near-future deal.

You're right! It is like that. I had to read an excerpt from The Handmaid's Tale for a class and was intrigued enough to read the whole book. I didn't like it that much. The basic story premise (using the Biblical story of Rachel giving her handmaid to Jacob since she can't have children herself to justify surrogate mothering) is all right, but the book comes off as rather feminist (and Margaret Atwood is a known feminist), which doesn't fit with my more conservative sensibilities.

Don't they use the alien-impregnates-a-human idea in a lot of movies? I specifically remember a scene in Men in Black where a human woman gives birth to an alien baby. It was pretty gross.

I suppose the idea could be used in a few different ways - to help prepare for an alien invasion or for a more beneficial reason. I like the idea they had in the recent Race to Witch Mountain movie where the two alien kids were sent to Earth to retrieve research their parents had done to study Earth's ecology so they could save their own dying planet - despite the fact that the leaders of their planets wanted to just invade and take over Earth instead. Or of course there's the overused one-baby-that-will-save-the-world idea, which is currently being used in the upcoming horror film Legion. (Not that the idea is bad -- after all, that's Jesus's story, isn't it? - it's just overused in fiction).

[myrthman]

Jan 5, 2010 18:57:25 GMT -5 waldenwriter said:

Don't they use the alien-impregnates-a-human idea in a lot of movies? I specifically remember a scene in Men in Black where a human woman gives birth to an alien baby. It was pretty gross.

I think they were aliens in "human suits" but, I agree, it was gross. But in a cute way.

[ryain]

Dec 23, 2009 10:08:48 GMT -5 dmgraham said:

The first idea that enters my mind is the women in India are not willing. It is a slavery camp and the western couples have no idea they are being given an alien child. The alien must be hosted in a human body in order to build immunities and acclimatize to Earth. That is off the top of my head. ;D

The alien children grow, not knowing they are alien. Each being embedded with a tracking and control chip. When the aliens want to begin their takeover, they activate the chip. The story begins when several of the alien children revolt. They have found the Way and will risk dying to stay on the path of good.

I like this story. Keep us posted.

[newburydave]

Or how about a different take on it, loosely based on Anglo history.

In a future world where humans spread across many worlds; men and women are so busy making money and cutting deals that they can't take time out for childbearing/nurturing ($100,000 / hour is my internal rate of return, dude).

To deal with the normal human desire for children, these ultra rich money machines, set up some worlds to be nursery planets where "poor" women are supported in colonies, impregnated with zygotes from "power couples", bear and raise the children of the elites.

(This is 17th to 19th century Brittan at the height of the Empire. It could be the US if we keep being the center of the economic world. It was ancient Rome in it's heyday.)

Where it goes from there is anyone's guess, or plotline ;D

SGD