What if humankind goes sterile - that's an interesting premise to base a story on. But I have some serious issues with this one.
The beef I have with it is the way they see the mutant babies.
Very few people are still fertile and (so they say) all of the babies carried to term in the last 10 years have had mutations. The prospect of having a handicapped child is so gross to the main character that she recoils at the news of her pregnancy and wants to terminate even when she's told she's "the one" and the child will be fine.
Knowing your child will be handicapped is seriously sad for a parent, I'm not trying to make light of this, I'm not even on the side of those who condemn abortions in cases you learn prenatally of a serious birth defect that will give the child a short life of pain and suffering.
But seriously, in a world (IN A WORLD...) gone sterile, who wouldn't at least try - and the mutation-babies we get to see are just not overly pretty, they have skin problems and well, maybe they are mentally handicapped, maybe not, but they surely are no monsters. Because, newsflash: people with disabilities ARE NOT MONSTERS. People who aren't just PERFECT are not monsters. If you think like that it's a very good thing if you die out.
They wouldn't even have had to change the story so much - they could have mixed in that the evil government doesn't want non-perfect babies and that they'd kill them - that would give a mother a good reason to dread her pregnancy and evil governments tend to be *very* horrible.
That's actually another, minor point, I cringed at. For a world gone sterile they don't seem do be doing very much about it and you'd expect a much *greater* infringement on citizens' privacy and self-determination such as mass invitro fertilizations, treating people like cattle, etc - if they had focused on that (they grazed it a bit) it would have made a better basis for the issue of how women's bodies tend to be taken away from us, treated as the property of men.
The beef I have with it is the way they see the mutant babies.
Very few people are still fertile and (so they say) all of the babies carried to term in the last 10 years have had mutations. The prospect of having a handicapped child is so gross to the main character that she recoils at the news of her pregnancy and wants to terminate even when she's told she's "the one" and the child will be fine.
Knowing your child will be handicapped is seriously sad for a parent, I'm not trying to make light of this, I'm not even on the side of those who condemn abortions in cases you learn prenatally of a serious birth defect that will give the child a short life of pain and suffering.
But seriously, in a world (IN A WORLD...) gone sterile, who wouldn't at least try - and the mutation-babies we get to see are just not overly pretty, they have skin problems and well, maybe they are mentally handicapped, maybe not, but they surely are no monsters. Because, newsflash: people with disabilities ARE NOT MONSTERS. People who aren't just PERFECT are not monsters. If you think like that it's a very good thing if you die out.
They wouldn't even have had to change the story so much - they could have mixed in that the evil government doesn't want non-perfect babies and that they'd kill them - that would give a mother a good reason to dread her pregnancy and evil governments tend to be *very* horrible.
That's actually another, minor point, I cringed at. For a world gone sterile they don't seem do be doing very much about it and you'd expect a much *greater* infringement on citizens' privacy and self-determination such as mass invitro fertilizations, treating people like cattle, etc - if they had focused on that (they grazed it a bit) it would have made a better basis for the issue of how women's bodies tend to be taken away from us, treated as the property of men.