Against baby factories: The individual family protects us from state power

So weird.

> how frustrating must it be that manufacture of the most important product of all — new human beings — cannot be scaled up or digitised; can only happen slowly and organically within the bodies of individual women?

Frustrating to whom? A few religious zealots who take "be fruitful and multiply" to its extreme? Shrinking countries like Russia, perhaps. Pregnancy is cosmetically inconvenient and occasionally life-threatening (and C-sections sever lots of interesting things) so it's easy to imagine the wealthy going for pregnancy-free reproduction. But after your 14th kid or so, it gets to be a bit much, and all 14 in diapers at the same time would be a bit overwhelming?

> With an efficient, centralised source of new workers, governments can continue positioning having a family as an unaffordable luxury without staring down the barrel of demographic collapse. You’re thirty years old and spend all your salary renting a box room in a flat you share with four strangers? That used to be at least partly the state’s problem as well as your own — but not anymore.

First, what government suggests that families are an unaffordable luxury? Societal expectations of music lessons,summer camp and non-second-hand clothing are what make child-rearing expensive.

As I read it, it implies that families springing from wombs would become eccentric, while people emerging from vats would become the norm.

But the vat people would still have adolescence, hormones, all the standard causes of rebellion and instability, and would have only state workers as their comrades/family. "You're grounded, no car keys" becomes "You're incarcerated" so I suspect the revolution won't take long to start.

I suppose the cost side of raising all the children to be productive drones isn't prohibitive? It costs a fair amount to raise a child to productive adulthood, but of course all the rich countries have lots of extra housing lying around to house the kids and the state workers raising them. Or just raise them in barracks, by legions of nannies?

After all, in this picture, the state is the parent and family for the vat people. But the vat people will live, work with and have hormonal overflows with standard family people who still exist. The picture is a lot more complicated than just "set up a baby factory and run it".