Cloned Meat and Vat Kids

The Cloned Meat Production Boom

In the early part of 2033, Jason Maxwell debuted the uterine approximation tank, or UAT, although because of the appearance and similarities of the acronym to the word they are often called "vats." The UAT is a completely artificial environment designed originally to allow the growth of cloned farm animals.  The fantastic thing about the vat tanks is that they could actually grow an animal to physical maturation in half the time.  As production on vat tanks grew, prices for production and maintenance dropped to the point where cloned animals where cheaper to produce than the real thing.

Animal rights activists were naturally outraged by this technology at first.  To counter this, the animals that were grown were done so without a brain - simply enough brain function to remain functionally living within the vat but would be unable to think or feel.  While many animal rights activists and vegetarians still balk at the idea, many people now joked that beef just became a vegetable.

Vat Kids

In the fall of 2036, just as vat tanks where becoming cheaper, Leslie Harriss became pregnant.  Many other young girls (she was just 15 at the time) become pregnant and, not ready to be a mother, Leslie wanted to have an abortion.  Two days before she was going to have the procedure, President Alexander Thompson signed a bill into law that defines human life as beginning once a heartbeat can be detected.

When Leslie went in for the procedure, the new ultrasound monitors the clinic had could detect a clear, steady heartbeat.  Leslie could not have the abortion. Devastated, she went to her family.  Her father, Wilson Harriss, was a wealthy entrepreneur in the emerging field of VAT technology and an eccentric Libertarian and stepped up with a bold idea.

Harriss' idea was simple: He purchased a small VAT tank, generally one the size used for raising hog, and hired a very accomplished microsurgeon to remove the fetus from Leslie and deposit it into the VAT tank.  The surgery was tricky, and no sooner than had it been completed and monitors showing a healthy heartbeat than did the FBI bust down the door to the building the lab was in.

The ensuing moral, social, and ethical debate as well as the coinciding legal battle was bizarre.  Professors from a host of fields are still debating the actual case and its social effects.  By the time the trial reached the Supreme Court, Leslie had decided to keep the child after all as she saw it develop in the vat and was born.  The case, however, had taken on a life of its own.  People wanted a precedent and they wanted it now.

The trial was the most hotly covered since Roe v Wade.  The US Government presented its case: that the vat tanks were no substitute for a mother, nor guaranteed the child would survive to birth.  Harriss' lawyer countered that until the child was put up for adoption, it had a mother and that once the child was out of the biological mother’s body it could be adopted by a genuine mother – before the child was born.  As for its odds of survival they were actually greater than "natural" births: the fetus was monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and had a constant stream of nutritious food and clean air fed in via the artificial blood.  A naturally conceived child grown in such an environment, lawyers argued, is the ultimate resolution of pro-choice and the right to life.

The Court ultimately decided five to four in favor of Harriss.  Justice Daniel Hedges, the senior justice of the majority wrote "It is gratifying to see that technology and the innovation of Americans have come together to provide an equitable as well as ethical solution to a debate that has raged within our society for over sixty years.  By preserving the right to life of the child while maintaining a human beings own right to have their bodies freed from the constraint of the law, the defendants (Harriss) have brought about a new age upon this world."

Chief Justice Marcia White wrote in the dissenting opinion "It is a perversion of both nature and of the law to allow such an abomination to be wrought by science.  This child will never have the social, moral, and spiritual connections to its mother nor her mother to it as would a child born naturally."

For right or wrong, the precedent was set.  Today Wilson and Leslie Harriss run Harriss Biomatics.  Their chief income earner is Our Womb, Your Child a global chain of "scientifically enhanced gestation centers designed to give your baby better than nature can."  These so called vat-kids are now rarely visited by their parents.  The vast majority of the customers of Our Womb, Your Child are the corporate businesswomen who feel they are too busy to put up with the hassle of pregnancy.  A small portion of their customers are middle-class families who for medical reasons cannot carry the child safely to term or want to try and give their child an early head start (studies have proven enhanced physical and mental development of a child carried a full nine months in a vat).  About a quarter of the patrons, sadly, are people who view the vats as a quick and legal abortion: pay the upfront cost to have the child implanted in the vat and then cancel the contract.  The child then becomes a ward of Our Womb, Your Child.

Our Womb, Your Child does try to adopt out these unwanted children and has a reasonable success rate.  But with the decrease in miscarriages for infertile couples, adoption - even of infants - simply is not as popular as it once was.  These children are often simply left to develop in the vats, educated as they grow via induction nerve simulation.  When the children reach an equivalent physical "age" of 16 they are decanted, given a name, an ID, and a bill for their life.

Some of these kids opt to work off their debt for the parent company.  They are fiercely loyal to Harriss Biomatics, and even refer to Leslie as "Mother Harriss" and Wilson as "Grandfather."  Critics argue that this is simply because they are brainwashed during development.  Harriss Biomatics counter that they are simply grateful the people who saw them through to life as any loving child is.  Meanwhile, the kids who did not opt to stay with the company hit the street in debt and unemployed.  Those who find legitimate work generally have their wages garnished for the next several years to repay Harriss Biomatics.  Those who do not end up sinking into the life of crime and violence that is the DMZ.