Baby Factory

It turns out we are the Von Neumann machines.

Take the female body. Now, instead of visualizing a human being, with all the markings of independent thought and higher intelligence, visualize an organic device that can be used to create babies. This is no doubt rather creepy (particularly for our female viewers), but sometimes this is because it is believed to be necessary, to deal with a heavily depleted race of species. On the other hand, this trope can just as easily be engaged in for the sake of evil. Babies can be sold for delicious, delicious profit. Or alternatively, they're just delicious. You can guess what a sufficiently evil character will do from this point.

The Baby Factory symbolizes the idea of a woman as being chained to her biology, and also represents the darker side of Babies Make Everything Better. Come what may, babies must be created. No, she doesn't get to have any interaction with the baby. Probably for the better, since she's likely to resent the life this has given her. Even worse, the mother might actually enjoy it- sure, we've reduced the higher functions of humanity to the economic functions of supply and demand, but it's a living.

This trope is a central ramification of any work where creating Designer Babies is a societal directive. Many Science Fiction writers avoid it altogether by providing a means of creating babies that doesn't require human wombs or (usually non-consensual) sexual intercourse. Usually this takes the form of a Uterine Replicator.

On rarer occasions, men are also involved in this trope, usually as a result of a Gendercide forcing the survivors to be as engaged in the baby-making business as the women who carry the babies to term. Usually in these cases things are not as bad for the women, who because of large supply, have the choice of whether or not they participate in this process thanks to their relatively high Gender Rarity Value.

In some modern works a woman actually sees herself as one of these, and uses the babies she can make as fulfillment in the more traditional Babies Make Everything Better vein. This doesn't exactly make things better. Can result in Too Many Babies. Mars Needs Women may be involved if there are aliens in the story.

See also: Mother of a Thousand Young, and People Farms, for other human ranching purposes.

Examples of Baby Factory include:

Comic Books

• The Psions in the DC Universe treat their females like this.

Literature

• Kzinti females in Known Space are non-sentient, due to genetic engineering.
• The Axlotl tanks in Dune are actually the females of the house Bene Tleilax.
• The purpose of the handmaids in The Handmaid's Tale is to provide this service. They're not particularly good at it, though, mostly because the authoritarian society they live in demands that the babies have a specific father, and the society in question is unwilling to acknowledge that the reason some wives can't get pregnant may have more to do with lazy sperm than a faulty ovary.
• On Gor the Priest Kings are - unknown to human Goreans - an insectoid species with a queen in the insect sense; she's revered but doesn't have any actual power. The power of the high council is invested in the First Five Born (of which by the time we meet them there are only two left). The Mother dies in the third book, and the plot of the fourth book concerns recovery of the last female egg, so as to restart the sequence (they already have a male).
• In Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, the corrupt and oppressive intergalactic government enforces its will by means of psychic assassins called Servants. They get more Servants by picking women with strong psychic abilities to breed to the current Servant and giving them drugs so that they have as many babies as possible (the women, naturally, get no choice in this matter). The children are taken away as soon as they're born, and... well, no one knows what happens to the mother after that.
• Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive. The insect like humans of the Hive have a practice of slicing off most of the body above the waist and below the knees and using the remainder for breeding purposes.
• Jonathan Swift's famous essay, A Modest Proposal suggests farming women around Europe for babies to eat once they hit 12 months old as a means of dealing with recurrent famine problems.
• In Lois Lowry's The Giver, girls are selected at the age of twelve to begin training as Birthmothers, producing offspring for the Community that are immediately taken away. Once they meet their quota, Birthmothers spend the rest of their lives as factory labourers.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's Spectrum, a race of Lizard Folk often travel with four-legged pets. It turns out these are their females who have lost their sentience as a result of a radical evolutionary change caused by an ancient cataclysm.
• Lensman contains a gender-reversed example: The males of Lyrane II are non-sentient and about four feet tall.
• How Werewolves view women in the Women of the Otherworld series, as a result of Gender Equals Breed.
• In World War Z after the war finishes, the heavily depleted Holy Russian Empire uses women this way.
• Inverted in China Miéville's Perdido Street Station with the khephri, as the males are big nonsentient beetles who are of little use beyond reproduction to the females, who look like attractive human women ...except for their heads, which look like big beetles.
• Flash for Freedom! Flashman and the other crewmen on the slave ship are encouraged to sleep with as many female slaves as possible, as women pregnant with lighter skinned babies can be sold at a higher price. Oddly enough, given his usual lechery, Flashman isn't particularly keen on the idea, and takes a single slave as his concubine instead.

Live Action Television

• In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Doctor Pulaski ends up telling two colonies (one consisting of traditional Irishmen, and the other of slowly degenerating clones) that they must engage in widescale polygyny and polyandry in order to gain an appropriate amount of genetic diversity. One Irishwoman expresses disdain that they apparently have to modify the entire way their culture examines the family for the sake of some oddly defined scientific reasons, but ends up agreeing to go along with it.
  • The illogic of the trope being applied in this situation was deconstructed in a Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella that essentially spends the entire story asking "What were the Enterprise crew thinking?"
    • The in-show explanation is that neither colony has enough genetic diversity on its own to survive, though there's no reason they couldn't just open immigration from the Federation.
• Sliders:
  • One world they encounter has recently suffered a massive decrease in the number of available fertile males- the male Sliders are promptly rounded up and sent to a breeding camp once they're discovered.
  • The Cromags have to engage in this trope because their females, due to some disease or something, can't effectively propagate the race. Main character Wade ends up as one, and that's the last we hear of her until season five, where we find she and other humans are being used to power new sliding technology.
• The Cylon 'farms' on the occupied Colonies in Battlestar Galactica.
• Space: Above and Beyond depicts the InVitros being born, fully grown, from one of these.
• An episode of Earth: Final Conflict indicates that the Taelons were using human clones and the cover of an infertility clinic to make Half Human Hybrids. It also stated that Sandoval was also tinkering with the results as well.
• A very distressing example occurs in Stargate SG-1. SG1 finds a planet where the people have developed a virtual panacea which keeps them in perfect health. They later find out that the drug is basically "ground up Goa'uld", as Jack puts it, harvested by enforced breeding of a captive Goa'uld queen. Things get even worse when they find out that the queen in question is Egeria, the mother of the Tok'ra, and pretty much the only good Goa'uld ever.

Music

• Unfortunate Implication example: Pearl Jam's "Do The Evolution" music video.

Tabletop Games

• In Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Skaven females are still bloated baby-makers lacking intelligence or even adequate muscles to support moving their own girth out of their dens.

Video Games

• Brood Mothers from Dragon Age are this, Nightmare Fuel, and a Mook Maker boss all in one.
• The Gears of War Expanded Universe: while all able-bodied men were conscripted into the armed forces after E-Day, all fertile women were required to help repopulate Sera. They were relocated to creches where they could be forced to bear children. Though these women got better food rations than front-line soldiers, some of those front-liners considered time with the women at the "breeding farms" a reward.
• Oddworld has Queen Sam and Lady Margaret, the only mentioned females of the Mudokon and Glukkon species, respectively. While Lady Margaret is more of a case of Bee People, Queen Sam is kept in a controlled environment where all she does all day is lay Mudokon eggs, which will be grown into slaves (or, in Abe's Odyssee, food). Her Glukkon masters have gone to the trouble of engineering The Shrink, an artificial intelligence designed solely to keep Queen Sam from reflecting on where her eggs are going, lest this realization make her stop laying. Also, she's kept in a literal factory.
• In Super Monday Night Combat, one of the announcers can sometimes bring up the "Dame Of The Game" prize: One "lucky" female audience member is selected at random, given a bouquet of flowers, and then shipped off to an offworld colony to help with repopulation.

Others

• According to Nazisploitation films and novels (even some mainstream fiction picked up the Urban Legend, e.g. Bear Island by Alistair MacLean) Those Wacky Nazis would select racially pure German women to be impregnated by virile SS men, in order to create the Master Race. In actuality while the Nazis did have an organisation that helped care for the offspring of SS members (even illegitimate children) with the goal of increasing the birth rate (which had fallen drastically due to the Great Depression) there was no 'breeding program'.
  • They did, however, encourage women to have children by giving them rewards for doing so. The more children they had, the bigger their rewards would be - some were even given medals for doing "great service to their country". While they weren't forced into it, to increase the birthrate, they made it worth the girl's while to get married to an SS soldier and have several children by him.
  • German soldiers in occupied territories were discouraged from forming relationships with local women. The exception to this was in countries that were perceived as being more "Aryan," that is to say Norway and Denmark. Here the soldiers were not only encouraged to seek out the company of the local women, there was also built a state-of-the-art hospital in Norway specifically for expecting women where the child had a German father.
• On a related vein, in Fascist Italy women were given medals for bearing many children, and soldiers were required to salute pregnant women.
• Immigrants are often seen as this by the native population, especially when they receive financial aid based on the number of children they have. It contributes significantly to the distrust they receive.
• Any sort of Hive Queen (whether a real creature such as bees, or a fantasy creature or race), whose primary (or only) purpose is to pop out eggs or babies.