The babies didn’t cry, the endless chemicals pumped into the labs stopped that. Those for the movement used this as an argument that what was carried out was painless, but it was far from.
They’d run out of animals. Maybe the torment they’d been put through was enough to drive them away, and they’d all died out of sheer exasperation at their own existence. The people wondered what to do next. How would they know whether their shampoo would make their eyes sting? Whether their make up was safe? Whether their perfume would irritate their skin?
Babies had been the obvious choice. They were so many unwanted births going on up and down the world, and the human population was ever increasing. It was sensible really. Only… There weren’t as many unwanted babies as they thought.
So they’d set up the birthing suites. The “suite” was little more than a box room, decked in tubes and wiring, where un-expectant mothers soon found themselves expecting… expecting it all to end soon, at least. The governments paid a certain secret company to round up any solitary women, anyone who wouldn’t be missed to partake in their experiments. All they had to do was provide the meat. A woman would be kept just alive enough to allow her to grow a baby, and then nine months later would give birth to a soundless, motionless, but very much alive, baby. And then the whole process would start again.

***

Catherine picked over the streets; she was so concentrated she didn’t see the figures approaching her. As the shadows fell over her back, she turned and glanced upwards. The last thing she saw were the hands coming towards her.

Tubes. Lots of tubes. Tubes coming out of the wall. Tubes coming out of me. Out of my stomach, out of my wrists, out of my head. Thick tubes leading to my abdomen. Thin tubes coming out of my chest.
Is that my heart beating? I don’t know… I don’t… Remember?
“Insemination beginning” came a strange voice I had never heard before. I feel the tubes around me pumping me with liquids. My eyes won’t shut, they’re just staring, staring at all the tubes.
The sensation is ending. I hear beeps as I drift in and out of conscious. I feel as if I’m floating, carried upon an endless stream of water. And then I feel myself letting it slip. I’m falling unconscious.

“Why don’t you just answer the question?” Snapped the irate interviewer.
“I have already given you a sufficient answer, Miss. We need this research, we need our experiments. Without it we would not have the cure for cancer, we would not have the cure for AIDS, millions of people are alive today because of this research.”
“But is it, or is it not true that the cure for cancer is highly unreliable when injected into an adult human. Many people have died from it… in fact” the interviewer looked down at a piece of paper “only a handful of people survived.”
“That is a mere conspiracy theory.” Shrugged the other man.
“And the stories of hundreds of women going missing? Is this completely unrelated.”
The man spat furious indignation “How dare you! The police are doing all they can to find this evil group of individuals. To even suggest that the government has anything to do with it is… is...”
Perfectly true. But those who suggested it went missing. The interviewer came home two weeks later to find her husband dead, and a group of evil individuals waiting for her.



I feel myself waking again. Pain. Absolute immense pain, it’s filling my mind with a blank white sheet. It rips, a line of blood runs. I realise I am giving birth. I see visions, fleeting, as the pain cuts through. Endless halls of still infants, their heartbeats beating a horrific rhythm in my brain. Somewhere in my brain a door opens in my brain and a single lyric, I always found painful to think about began echoing round and round the empty corridors of my body “In the bloodbath of birth… in the bloodbath of birth… in the bloodbath of birth…. In the bloodbath… of birth… birth…. birth... birth...”
And everything was black again.

“Breaking news; world leaders of the world are arrested as the truth behind the new vivisection regulations is uncovered. Thousands of women found in so called “baby farms. The nightmare years are over.”

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