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Having My Baby

Michael Ceraolo

While the world was changing around them
the anti-scientists of the early third millennium
proved the truth of the aphorism that said
some people you don’t have to satirize,
you only have to quote them,
and
they soon gave way to more subtle hucksters

[at that time in history
the anti-statist followers of the atheist Goddess
made unholy common cause with the followers
of a fundamentalist Sky God,
allowing
them to control intimate personal matters
in exchange for their support of government largesse
in the form of tax breaks and such]

And
these hucksters framed their arguments for this
in the ever-enduring way,
that of the profit motive
and the furtherance of private profit,
and the sinister synergy
of subsidies and systemic control
led to the creation of a pregnancy-industrial complex

And
what had been perceived,
mistakenly,
as a war against all women
soon devolved into,
as
all identity politics eventually do,
a matter of class
(always
defined in America as the ability to pay),
and
the classes were defined thus:

First-Class Pregnancy,
where
the wealthy were able to access
the new technologies that reduced
the term of pregnancy to a matter
at first of weeks,
then,
with further refinements of the process,
to a matter of days,
and
further were not limited to
the traditional way of conception;

Second-Class Pregnancy,
where
the once-vast but ever-declining
mass in the middle were held
to the traditional term of pregnancy
and the traditional way of conception
(unless
they were downwardly mobile, in which case):

Third-Class Pregnancy,
where
those convicted of poverty or dissent
or any other crime against society
were sentenced to terms of pregnancy
of varying lengths longer
than the traditional term,
and
were not permitted the traditional way of conception,
instead being artificially inseminated (forcibly)


And
the term of pregnancy wasn’t the only change
in the matter of reproduction;
such change
went hand-in-hand with the science
of geneology
(said science
had a wide variety of trade names
depending on the patenting company,
none of which need to be mentioned)

This science
produced new therapeutic modalities
(again based on the ability to pay)
that meshed well with the term innovations,
starting
with the ability to alter genetic material
to maximize desirable traits
and
minimize,
if not eliminate,
undesirable ones

Some having the desirable traits
but unfortunately at the same time
cursed with limited reproductive capacity
underwent therapies for the purpose
of enhancing that capacity,
while
others underwent the therapies
in a desperate attempt to speed up
the evolutionary process
to enable them to deal with
the effects of the increasing heat

[such effects included
not only the ever-increasing temperatures,
but
the exponential growth of heat-related parasites,
and
the discovery of new kinds of cancers
as well as the growth of the older kinds,
and
other previously unforeseen problems]

But
such treatments could not speed up
evolution fast enough to keep pace
with the changes in the biosphere
(though
such changes did enable the enhanced
fortunate few percent of the population
to find other ways of escape)

And
a different fate awaited those
who were unable to escape,
and
were thus triply doomed,
in
the third millennium’s version
of three-strikes-and-you’re-out:

Strike One:
being
unable to afford either the genetic treatments
or the shorter-term pregnancy;

Strike Two:
having
themselves and all their offspring
be the victims of many mutations
as a result of the underground radiation
released by the human-caused earthquakes;

and
Strike Three:
with
the Second- and Third-Class pregnancies
resulting in ever-increasing rates of termination,
rates
that eventually reached nearly one hundred percent

And as a result of this unacknowledged war
the planet’s population dwindled even further-----

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