1. Pam Halter says:

    Man!!  I love all three.  Soooo hard to choose. But I’m gonna have to go with Lady Arin – YES.  I hope the three of you develop these stories. I totally want to read them all.

  2. notleia says:

    Oh look, a medically based one I can poke holes in!

    Um, no, they do not abort at 32 weeks, and if that was a miscarriage, something was wrong with that fetus and it wouldn’t survive long enough to still be kicking in a closet somewhere. It wouldn’t even be a fetus, because if they can survive outside the womb, they are neonates. Abortions especially for convenience happen ASAP — like, first trimester — and if you’ve made it to 32 weeks, something be wrong somewhere. Let’s leave lurid, inaccurate stories about Satanic baby-killers in the ’90s, please.

    I have medical textbooks handy, one with gross pictures, if anyone wants references.

    • I thought there were context clues that set this in a dystopian future, so I thought they could make whatever rules they wanted. Didn’t have anything to do with the way things are done today. So, no, not “inaccurate” because the author is imagining the way things are in the world she created.

      Becky

      • notleia says:

        Well, who’s gonna waste so many weeks of their life on a pregnancy they don’t want? Who’s going to legislate forcing someone to waste so many weeks of their lives and impersonal, nationalized health care (nationalized health care is dystopian, right?) on a pregnancy when they don’t intend to get a baby out of it for the good of the state? Forcible sterilization is A+ dystopianism and makes way more sense if we don’t have a maternal corpse (or still-squirming almost-corpse) in the closet next to the “fetus.”

        The moral of this story is to not strain suspension of disbelief.

        • Maybe you’re just overthinking things, notleia. 😉

          Becky

        • Khai says:

          As someone who did not choose this story as their favorite (I did not find it as interesting as some of the others), I get what you’re saying. “Logic problem”. But if you must know, in America abortion is different than in other countries. I will not bash other countries on this thread – but yes, 32 weeks would happen. So even if you think it’s improbable here (although I would say capitalism might play a role), there are plenty of societies with draconian laws where it is acceptable to abort a neonate and there is pressure to enforce it. And maybe this society is inspired by the author’s experience in another country? If it’s not, yeah, I dunno how insightful the author is actually being in the premise. But the literary creation of a dystopian society where social pressures would put a main character in this position, has merit for the reader to explore. Because humans can and have been pushed to this kind of behavior. Maybe not in the USA or the West. But the rest of the world is still human civilization – what a scary thought.

          • R. J. Skaer says:

             
            Part of the fun of creating a fictional world is that we can magnify, we can hyperbolize a scenario in order to fully explore it. In today’s world you don’t come face to face with an aborted baby, confronted in the most violent way possible with the result of your choice. But what if you were?
             
            I imagined this as a future where the number of children you are expected to have is limited, and you become a social outcast if you have more than 2. The mother, unwilling to lose her baby, agonized over her decision for months before deciding she couldn’t stand being abnormal. She couldn’t take the shame of a third child, the loss of her position, the loss of freedom from diapers and baby spit-up, and chose to end her pregnancy.
             

             
            Notleia, what I wanted to do was explore a moral dilemma, but if I had wanted to write a contemporary story you’re right, the baby shouldn’t have been much over 24 weeks, since Kermit Gosnell delivered and killed a number of babies at that age (and when writing fiction the more dramatic facts are the most fun to play with. 🙂 ).

            • Khai says:

              Huh….:) Thanks for chiming in RJ.
              Infanticide has been with us for many cultures throughout human history – for many reasons (some I probably would have done in those circumstances). I think exploring how human society could evolve again to where moral people make that choice in an “advanced” future – is actually very important. I have a pet peeve of how ancient civilizations (that lasted a thousand years or more under the same government, with more advances than our own, in some ways) are viewed to have been “Not there yet like WE are….” So we don’t get introspective about what we can learn about our future from their societal behaviors. Kudos for going there.

            • notleia says:

              Wasn’t that guy doing illegal ones for desperate, low-income women?

          • notleia says:

            Yeah, I was thinking at least a developed country, what with the sterile closet stocked with boxes of gloves, which kinda necessitates more detail on why we have perfectly good neonate that could be put in a NICU and then a state orphanage/creche/whatever-sounds-nationalized and be turned into a future member of the taxable workforce.

            In my mind, mandated population control means early abortion, as in less than 12 weeks, if they haven’t already sterilized everybody.

            Unless that baby is a weird mutant-baby that will destroy Tokyo with its mind or something, and someone is trying to make it and all the problems that come with it quietly disappear from the plane of existence. That’s the kind of framing I need to crank the suspension of disbelief higher.

  3. Julie D says:

    I think that number 3 had just the right mix of questions and information. Number 2 had too many questions to follow.

  4. Aaaaaaugh, such a hard decision because I loved them all!!!  Good work, everyone! 😀

  5. Katherine says:

    Aww, thank y’all! I had such fun writing my entry, and definitely plan to develop it.

What do you think?