Birth

The meaning of birth has shifted since the Radical Age. Most people in the Radical Age believed that birth was a difficult, dangerous and imperfect process, and they sought to control it with various technologies. Sometimes the use of these technologies was so fetishised that they were used regardless of the cost to birther and baby.

The most obvious and shocking example of this was the HR marriage package and the MAKER tanks. Round about the 2070s when sperm was no longer available at any price even from the Fount of Life Human Resource Bank. As the price of sperm rose, an advertising blitzkrieg began: desk clerks, shop attendants, truckers, agricultural labourers were deluged with images of beautiful honeymoon destinations, handsome men wining and dining ordinary-looking women, and luxurious company villas. The pirce of this fantasy? Signing up with a Human Resource producer. On signup the woman had to pay a year's salary in advance. She then got to enjoy her honeymoon woth her company-appointed professional husabnd. All the men who played these roles were loopheads so they could not impregnate the women.

Once the honeymoon was over, the woman would come back to the comapny bungalow and live there with her husband while she was fitted with a preassembled embryo: the egg harvested from her, the sperm donated by an unknown hanyo. The RanD had ot certify that she was pregnant, after which from the fourth month on she had to inahbit a MAKER. Apart from being suspended in the gel, she had a great life, reading magazines, getting on facebook, wearing the latest maternity wear, lazing around, until birth time. Then the child would be delivered by remote Csection, the female organs taken out and the woman sewn up (this was to promote 'better healing'). Now the catch: if the child was a girl, the woman got to take her home. If the child was a boy, the woman got her money back and a box of complimentary chocolates to take home, but the boy stayed with the company. These boys filled the lower rungs of the corporate hierarchy and were known as orbisons. The woman would not know whether she was carryign a son or daughter, but the corporation would know (since they made the embryos). The corporations would adjust the ratio of male to female so they got enough clerks but also replenished teh breeding stock.