Baby Factory

It turns out we are the Von Neumann machines.

"Are you a cute, young girl who likes to cook and clean? Do you have hips suited for bearing many children? Four, five, six, and maybe even twelve?"

— Dieter's letter, Wolfenstein: The New Order

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 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. 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. See also Mandatory Motherhood and Breeding Cult. Particularly dark examples of this trope often overlap with Womb Horror and Breeding Slave. Sometimes involves a Chosen Conception Partner. If non-humans get in on the action, it overlaps with Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong and/or Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Attack on Titan breaches this while discussing the plan that Eren and Zeke had to keep the people in the Walls safe once and for all in regard to Historia Reiss. She being the last of the royal family around, and the plan required access to the Founding Titan's powers and a royal family member, this would mean that she would have to have children as soon as possible because she was going to eat Zeke, who was approaching his 13-year limit, then be used to keep the people of Marley away with the threat of the Rumbling for another 13 years, before her descendants would repeat the cycle.
• The Third type androids in Armitage III were designed for this purpose in order to increase the Martian population, though they were also given sapience and their own personalities. This, combined with the fact that the main villains of the film are feminists who have taken over Earth's government who aren't happy about this, can make the story rather uncomfortable for western audiences.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, it's how Hinatsuru, Suma and Makio were raised as, their ninja clan saw the kunoichi as nothing but disposable pieces for making children to expand the clan and when needed they were expected to lay their lives in some intel gathering mission; however fate smiled upon them as they were paired a husband that actually valued them as lives that should be cherished, Tengen flat out ordered them that happiness and preserving their lives is a priority, and he hasn't forced any children upon the girls, preferring to let heirs happen naturaly whenever they feel its the right time.
• The world of Gangsta. had a wee problem with many Twilight women being subjected to rampant sexual abuse — for both the reasons that people are just plain terrible and to create more Twilights, kids who would inherent the condition from their mothers and thus feed the Twilight slave system further. So... actually, both reasons are because people are just plain terrible.
• Yuki-onna in Rosario + Vampire have a very limited window to get married and have children before they become infertile, and their race is close to dying out. This is Played for Drama with the yuki-onna Mizore, who is stuck between an Arranged Marriage to one of the series' villains and unrequited love with the protagonist.
• The horror manga Starving Anonymous applies the logic of industrial livestock farming to human beings (since its story is about aliens raising humans as cattle), including in the breeding domain. The protagonists enter the "breeding area" of one of those human farms, and it is not a pleasant picture at all. All the "breeders" are kept in cages and naked, like animals. On one side, men who have been turned into mindless brutes and sex-obsessed rapists by several years of pure steroids and lust-inducing drugs; on the other, women who were raped so many times and bore so many children through the years that their bodies have become distorted and their minds completely broken. One of them is seen unable to let go of the rotting remains of her latest baby, which died at birth. The worst part is that all of these descriptions were directly taken from the Real Life fate of animals in intensive farming industries.
• In Tokyo Ghoul, a Breeding Cult keeps women for the purpose of bearing either a "pure" heir or a disposable Tyke Bomb. Rize Kamishiro managed to escape this fate.
• Gender-inverted in World's End Harem, in which the few non-infected men are woken up from cryogenic sleep so that they can impregnate enough women to possibly bear a non-infected male child. There's a bit of leeway to how the women accomplish this, from setting up a "Truman Show" Plot staffed by haremettes, to creating a brothel-esque catalog, to outright restraining and pumping them full of hormones.

Comic Books

• In The Avengers #199 (written by David Michelinie), when Carol Danvers is introduced to the Avengers, we're told that she has become eight months pregnant by an unknown father, or by some unknown force. In issue #200 we get the baby delivery as well as Marcus Immortus (son of Kang the Conqueror and Revelation) admitting he'd kidnapped Ms. Marvel and tried wooing her with expensive clothes, serenading her with history's best musicians, etc. Apparently, however, she hadn't been won over because he says, "with a boost" from his father's "mind machines", Ms. Marvel finally gave in. The reaction of the entire team is to throw a baby shower. (Err?) Chris Claremont explicitly called out the company's editors for their handling of the whole affair, both in having Carol herself call it out in Avengers Annual #10 and in The X-Men Companion II. This issue effectively killed Marcus' character as the company hurried to distance themselves from the nonsensical storyline.
  Claremont: Now, if that had been the point David [Michelinie] was trying to make, that these other Avengers are callous boors, okay then, I may disagree with the point, but if he followed through on it, it would have made sense. But it seemed to me, looking at the story, looking at the following story, that he was going for: "This is how you respond to a pregnancy."
• Batgirl (2000): A rare voluntary and one-off example occurs with Lady Shiva. She allowed herself to be impregnated solely as a business transaction, to provide a test subject for the child's father, and gave up the girl (Cassandra) immediately after she gave birth, not meeting the girl again for another seventeen years.
• The Psions in The DCU treat their females like this.
• Elephantmen: The Elephantmen were made by Mappo's genetic engineering and grown from embryos using local African women as surrogates. The mothers were kept under anesthetic and fed with IVs for the whole pregnancy and gave birth by c-section. More accurately had the newborn extracted from what was left of their bodies, as bearing an elephantman to term is 100% fatal. It's not discussed why some other species of mammal wasn't used, other than "Mappo is a monster".
• In Empowered, Ninjette's own father wants to reduce her to this. Ninjas sent from the clan have no qualms about chopping off her limbs to make this easier.
• X-23: Innocence Lost: Dr. Sarah Kinney is forced to become one by Zander Rice when she disobeys her superiors' orders by attempting to create a female clone of Wolverine. When she successfully creates the female embryo, Rice forces her to act as the surrogate. Nine months later, X-23 is born.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's eventually revealed that Ghidorah intends to forcibly impregnate Monster X (specifically Vivienne) with a "Death-Child", as another way to torment and break her before it finally assimilates her as its fourth head.
• The Power of Seven:
  • Hasn't actually happened, but Demelza basically states during some of her 'sessions' with Harry that she'd be willing to become one for him as an example of her devotion and submission to him.
  • Fleur posits that Harry could give her many fine, powerful daughters (part-Veela are not terribly fertile). As with Demelza, the idea seems to substantially rev her motor.
  • Katie teases Harry about the prospect of being the male version of this, combined with House Husband.
• Due to the presence of bloodlines in Naruto, characters subject to the Ron the Death Eater trope in Naruto fanfictions are generally shown to be so evil they're not above turning women (and more rarely, males), into baby factories if said women happened to have a bloodline. For example, this is a major plot point in Uchiha Heiress Remix, as the main character, Satsuki Uchiha, is masquerading as a male in order to avoid such a fate.
• Rocketship Voyager. Captain Janeway relates how, when she was an ensign, their rocketship was struck by a meteorite, killing everyone in the male berthing compartment. The surviving male officers then decided to set down on a planet for repairs, but when they decided to make this an Enforced Trope the women mutinied, using the legal justification that their officers had gone insane.
  Captain Janeway: Somehow this idea of waiting for rescue turned into a grand vision of the first Terran colony on Mercury, using the female crewmembers as a baby factory to consolidate later territorial claims. No-one cared what we had to say about the matter.
• In Wish Carefully, the Dark Purebloods are desperate to get some fresh new blood into their limited gene pool, which is leading to rampant inbreeding that is causing more squibs to be born, so they resort to kidnapping several young witches from poor backwater areas across the globe to serve as Breeding Slaves.
• In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, Matron Igorina reflects that every human woman is capable of being an Igorina for nine months of her life. Therefore, is it really surprising that some of us are capable of taking this a lot further even without getting pregnant? As she says, the potential is there to shape, refine and improve on the basic principles, after birth.
• Partially Kissed Hero: One of the many disturbing tropes of the story is how every female of child-bearing age we see in story thinks nothing of having as many children as their reproductive systems can support, and every female below child-bearing age plans on having as many children as their reproductive systems will be able to support. Post-menopausal females and women with fertility disorders do not seem to exist in this story.
• One Dracken, Two Dracken, Red Dracken, Blue Dracken explicitly states that the duty of Submissive Dracken is to bear more Dracken children, as the species is dying out. If you're lucky, you'll have a few years between heats and thus a few years between pregnancies. If you're unlucky, your heat will start up again basically immediately after giving birth, and so you'll effectively be pregnant every day for the rest of your life. No one seems to think any of this is worth commenting on, and all the Submissives in the fic are disturbingly content with the arrangement.
• Triptych Continuum: In the land of Eris, the death rate was so high that every mare who did not serve some absolutely vital function in the barricade point was expected to bear as many foals as possible to keep the pony race alive. Celestia and Luna were the third and fifth of seven children, and this was indicated to be a fairly normal family size.

Films — Animated

• In Disney's Mulan, this trope is brought up during the song, "Honor To Us All":
  "We all must serve our emperor,
  Who guards us from the Huns:
  A man by bearing arms,
  A girl by bearing sons."

Films — Live-Action

• Alien vs. Predator: The Xenomorph Queen chained and entombed in the Antarctic pyramid is used as this when it's awakened in the present day, and has implicitly been used this way by the Predators for millennia. The pyramid's mechanisms take the Queen's eggs to the sacrificial chamber, and the Queen's children that are born in a relatively controlled environment are hunted by the Predators as a rite of passage.
• In Dr. Strangelove, the title character's nuclear war survival plan calls for there to be a group of survivors, including "our top government and military men". To better facilitate this trope, there would be "a ratio of, say, ten females to each male" and "the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature". Naturally, monogamy will be "regrettably" abandoned, it being "a sacrifice required for the future of the human race".
• Jojo Rabbit: The girls at Hitler Youth camp are told their duty to their country will be to make children. Fräulein Rahm states she's had eighteen kids.
• Logan: The mothers of the children bred by Transigen for their X-23 program are treated as disposable wombs. Gabriela doesn't elaborate on what became of them, but the implication of her remarks, "girls nobody can find," is they were killed.
• The MacGuffin of Mad Max: Fury Road are the Five Wives, the harem of Immortan Joe that he was using to breed male heirs who aren't damaged by radiation. If they fail to produce a healthy baby boy after three tries, he casts them out.
• Shoot 'Em Up. The reason the bad guys are trying to kill the Badass and Baby. Several women are impregnated with the semen of a senator who needs a bone marrow transplant. The villains try to kill the senator by killing the mothers; one runs into the protagonist just before she's killed (just after she gives birth).
• Virus (1980): Less than twenty women of child-bearing age survive The Plague in Antarctica, and they end up required to have lots of kids to try to save humanity from going extinct.

Literature

• After the Revolution: The Heavenly Kingdom subscribes to a mixture of the Quiverful ideology (see the Real Life section) and the ideology of ISIS. It catfishes and attracts young christian women from outside its borders by promising them marriages to handsome young men and a meaningful life as volunteers in God's Kingdom, but in reality treats them as little more than breeding stock to produce babies, often through forcible marriages to any martyr who 'chooses' them.
• Gender Inverted in Fyodor Berezin's Ash, where the protagonist crash-lands on a thoroughly-nuked human colony world and discovered that an underground city still endures despite continued bombardment. The colonists, damaged by radiation and interbreeding, put him in a cell and proceed to pump him for sperm, but in a pragmatic, methodical way. They bring in a woman and have her strip and dance in front of him, but the guards won't actually let him touch her. Instead, he's then cattle-prodded to force ejaculation, and the sperm is then used to impregnate their women. Eventually, the leader of the city asks if the protagonist wants to actually have sex for variety's sake.
• In Beyond the Impossible, Demeter sets up "breeding camps" on planet Myridia to supply her army with new soldiers. Healthy women are chained and give birth in captivity, while sick or sterile are killed.
• In Philippa Ballantine's Books Of The Order trilogy, the protagonists encounter a cave where female members of the eponymous Order are chained to walls and raped by demon males, to breed hybrids. The main protagonist, to her horror, finds out that she is one such hybrid, and her mother managed to get her out of the "factory", but couldn't escape herself.
• In Bumped, teenage girls are heavily encouraged to be surrogate mothers for older couples after a Sterility Plague makes everyone over the age of 18 sterile.
• In Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise, a strange consequence of Population Control on many developed worlds (plus everyone being The Ageless) is the appearance of a type of women the titular protagonist calls "frantic mothers". These women have their maternal instinct dialed Up to Eleven, and they believe themselves to be wholly this trope. They are frequently the ones lobbying the governments to build colony ships and settle faraway planets. Eventually, governments give in and finance the costly undertaking, just to be rid of women like that. Many space traders (usually males) may also agree to transport groups of "frantic mothers" to young colonies, and the women are more than willing to pay for passage with sex, although they get testy if the space trader in question is sterile (perfectly reversible in this setting), ignoring the explanations of the problems of having a child in low gravity. While French dislikes such women, he does agree that they are a good reason why humanity has settled thousands of planets.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Tasia tells Joslyn women in the royal family are valued for producing children above all else, which includes her.
• Consider Her Ways: The function of the "Mother" caste. Thanks to biological modification, each of its members is grossly obese by nature and all but helpless to do anything without the help of attendant Servitors. They spend their days devouring huge meals and repeatedly, asexually, producing quadruplets. They're treated well and seem to be content with their existence, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they have absolutely no choice in the matter.
• Crest of the Stars: This forms a central conflict on the prison world of Lobnas II. When the planet is conquered, the prisoners have their sentences annulled (since they were not sentenced under Abh law). The male prisoners have a dream of starting their own nation on the planet, and wish to keep the female prisoners on the planet by force if necessary, since if there are no women to birth children, the planet's future is doomed from the start. The female prisoners, many of them victims of sexual abuse, obviously want absolutely no part in this and want off the planet now.
• Down Among the Dead Men is a 1954 scifi short by William Tenn. The protagonist is a soldier in a Bug War where all female soldiers have been removed from administrative duties so they can breed more soldiers. Even then it's not enough because the insectoid aliens they're fighting are a lot better at it (they just put a Queen alien on each ship) so other means of creating soldiers are being tried.
• In one of the Dragonriders of Pern books, there was a character who, having married a woman he despised for political gain, proceeded to impregnate her in the hope (eventually realized) that she would die in childbirth.
  • Queen dragons were treated as a non-human example during the Long Interval, as the dragons' numbers had declined to a point where there was only one breeding queen per generation, upon whom the perpetuation of the species depended. Queens weren't allowed to fly except to mate, and the notion of them flying against Thread was inconceivable.
• In Dragonvarld, members of the Sisterhood are typically supposed to be virgins (well, at least with regard to men), but that would lead to eventual extinction, so a group of them are designated as breeders. The process is controlled, and they do not have lasting contact with the fathers or with their specific offspring. Also, the first book has one of the main characters be subject to two different plans to produce a son with her who'll inherit her magic; neither party obtains her free consent, and she dies in childbirth.
• The Axlotl tanks in Dune are actually the females of the Bene Tleilax.
• In the Erebus Sequence, this is the answer to the question of where the Orfani come from. The sanatorio, supposedly an asylum for the mentally ill, is actually a place where the king breeds mutants with kidnapped women.
• Parodied in the 1960 short story Eve Times Four by Poul Anderson (possibly written as a Take That! to Queen Bee - see below) when an officer on a spaceship 'accidentally' maroons himself on a planet with several attractive women (though one is somewhat older than he expected) and tries to invoke this trope. They eventually figure out what he's up to, fix the Life Pod's engine and take off without him.
• Fade to White, an Alternate History short story by Catherynne M. Valente is set in a post-World War III United States where men and women are tested for intelligence, 'loyalty' and most important: fertility. Women who score highly get to raise their children in the more modern houses with the improved radiation-proofing. Men who score high become a Husband, serving as fathers to several families on a rotating basis. Society deliberately maintains the fiction that it's carrying on the values of pre-war era, giving the Husbands phony jobs and each family pretending the others don't exist. Less fertile men (or those who are black or asian) get either shipped out to the front line or take jobs where they must take regular hormone suppressants (so women will be encouraged to only have sex with the fertile Husbands).
• In 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.
• A Frozen Heart: Hans's father and most of his brothers see their wives as objects whose role is to produce more heirs for the kingdom.
• In The Giver, certain 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. The system is elaborated on in Son, and it is as sterile and creepy as one would expect — the women are even referred to as "Vessels" and their children as "Products," and they give birth blindfolded as not to get attached to their offspring.
• 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).
• 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.
• Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive. The insect-like humans of the Hive have a practice of salvaging valuable genes from damaged individuals by slicing off most of the body above the waist and below the knees and using the remainder for breeding purposes. Unlike most examples these "reproductive stumps" can be male as well as female.
• 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.
• This is Isabel's role at court in The Kingdom of Little Wounds. Notably right after her oldest daughter dies, the king comes to her bed to create another child as though Sophia were just a part to replace and Isabel a mechanism to make that replacement.
• Kzinti females in Known Space are non-sentient versions of this trope, due to genetic engineering. except when they are sentient, due to a long running conspiracy of sentient females.
• Lensman contains a gender-reversed example: The males of Lyrane II are non-sentient and about four feet tall. On the other hand, the Kalonians play it straight; the only function of Kalonian women is to bear Kalonian men.
• 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.
• The Night of the Triffids is set after a catastrophe that crashed human civilization and reduced humanity to small isolated settlements that are each, as far as they know, the only one left, so that they each face the question of how to repopulate the planet. The protagonist's settlement avoided this trope, settling on a polyamorous model that guarantees self-determination for the women, but later in the novel he encounters another settlement that plays the trope straight.
• Gender 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.
• In Promised, the final book in Caragh O'Brien's dystopian Birthmarked trilogy, the Enclave starts making fertile women become surrogate mothers. The women are given free housing and care. The women are brainwashed into believing it is a choice, however, leaving has dire consequences.
• The controversial 1958 sci-fi story The Queen Bee by Randall Garrett. A spaceship crashlands on a planet and the women are told they are legally required to establish a colony and populate it via this trope. When one women objects she's beaten into compliance, so another woman murders the remaining women to make herself too valuable to mistreat. Her punishment is a lobotomy so she'll still be available as breeding stock.
• Song Ching in Jack Chalker's Rings Of The Master series was specifically engineered for the seemingly mutual exclusive roles of physical and mental paragon and baby factory through the simple expedient of modifying her endocrine system to make her rationality dependent upon pregnancy hormones, giving her full use of her brilliant, cold and rational mind when she is pregnant but making her extremely distracted, horny and suggestible when she is not, effectively programming her to do anything to get pregnant as soon as possible after giving birth. This challenges her fellow Phlebotinum Rebels to plan their operations around the periods when she is functional, "service" her when she is not and care for her ever-growing family as she does not normally have the mindset that makes for a good mother. Hormone treatments are considered but discarded as they don't want to risk damaging her brilliant mind and she feels the need to say "screw you Dad" by bearing all the heirs her father expected her to produce for him in the service of the rebellion. The real kicker? Left to her own devices, she prefers women.
• The Saga of Seven Suns has secret genetic and breeding experiments being performed for the purpose of producing someone who could communicate with the hydrogues. An unusual example in that both genders are treated equally badly.
• Somewhat inverted in the case of Seven Eves — eight women are all that remain of the human race, seven of whom are still capable of childbearing, and, with the help of a genetic engineer, they voluntarily become "baby factories" in order to birth seven new races of humans.
• 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.
• In Julie Kagawa's series Talon, this is what happens to female dragons who are determined to be unable to be of any assistance to the Talon organization.
• How Werewolves view women in the Women of the Otherworld series, as a result of Gender Equals Breed.
• In World War Z, the Holy Russian Empire ends up resorting to these after the war ends, since there are so few young, fertile people left. The Russian woman the author interviews is currently pregnant with her eighth child; all her previous children are by different fathers, and they're taken away from her almost at once, presumably so she can get pregnant again as quickly as possible.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica (2003):
  • The female president of the colonies somewhat sensibly point out at one point that in order for humankind to survive in the long term following the destruction of the home worlds, its people have to start "making babies." Eventually, she reluctantly issues an executive order banning abortions (and establishing adoption procedures).
  • The Cylons on Caprica try to establish an incredibly creepy version of this en masse, to create hybrid offspring (since one of their God's commandments is to "be fruitful" and they can't reproduce with each other). It doesn't work, because it turns out Cylon biological reproduction (with humans or each other) requires the parents to actually love each other.
• Big Love: Second and third wives Nicki and Margene fear that they're this in regards to first wife Barb, given that Barb can't have any more children.
• Earth: Final Conflict:
  • One episode shows that the Taelons were using the cover of an infertility clinic to implant human females with fetuses that had neural implants.
  • Another episode shows the living Taleon mothership was growing Taelon embryos.
• Game of Thrones: Ramsay Bolton's clingy, jealous mistress catches Sansa trying to escape and implies that he will dismember her to the point of leaving her an immobile quadriplegic who can't escape again, but fulfill the only reasons Ramsay keeps her around: to birth legitimate children, and pacify the North by technically remaining married to House Stark. Did we mention Ramsay might actually do that?
  • House of the Dragon: Queen Aemma sees her role as primarily giving birth to heirs (male heirs if possible, but only one wound up surviving before her own death, her daughter Rhaenyra, who doesn't share that view, at least initially). Her husband King Viserys still loves her, that said, and it perhaps played a part in his decision to make Rhaenyra heir to the throne.
    Queen Aemma: We have royal wombs, you and I. The childbed is our battlefield.
    • Ironically, Rhaenyra, who was initially reluctant to having babies at all, ended up getting pregnant six times (with five successful births compared to her mother's one sucessful birth, Rhaenyra's own).
• The Handmaid's Tale: This is the purpose of the Handmaids.
• A temporary one is clandestinely made in Kingdom (2019), the Queen is faking a pregnancy and needs a royal heir to cement her position over the Crown Prince. She has a scheme where soon-to-be mothers who are down on their luck are taken in by a "wealthy patron" and housed and fed, to the delight of these expecting women. Should at least one son be born, he will be taken and passed off as the legitimate son of the now-zombified King.
• The Lottery has 100 citizens set to become this, pending the results of a national lottery.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In The Time Travelers, Reena is going to colonize a new planet, and says she's looking forward to the "minor population explosion" that's sure to happen once they arrive. Tom Servo quips that she'll be "Perpetually breeding like a termite queen..."
• One Life to Live: Asa makes it quite clear to new wife Blair that the only reason he dumped his previous wife her is that he viewed her as this (she's much younger than him)—by forcing himself on her and demanding that she bear him a son, lest he throw her and her mother out without a dime.
• Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story:
  • Princess Augusta tells Charlotte that her job is to bear "as many babies as possible" for Augusta's son George III.
  • In 1814, following the death of her only legitimate grandchild, Queen Charlotte cajoles her own children to make respectable marriages and produce babies of their own.
• 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. Arturo points out that he could easily solve their problem by introducing artificial insemination (this world never developed it), but no one cares to listen to what a man has to say, only how many women he can impregnate per day. In addition, they also engage in some eugenics by limiting eligible women to young beautiful ones.
  • The Kromaggs have to engage in this trope because their females, due to a biological attack by humans, 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.
• Space: Above and Beyond depicts the InVitros being born, fully grown, from one of these. Minor subversion, in that they are from *literal* factories, and no pregnancy is involved.
• A very distressing example occurs in Stargate SG-1. SG-1 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 queen ever—and so (thanks to Goa'uld Genetic Memory) the "Goa'uld" they're grinding up are actually Tok'ra. (The people doing this don't know that—they actually are only scarcely aware of the Goa'uld species generally and had never even heard of the Tok'ra before SG-1 showed up. When they find out the truth, they are horrified. Still, the Tok'ra are understandably incensed at this abuse, even if it was unwitting, of their mother and lost siblings—and since the process ends up killing Egeria, who makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save the people who abused her, mournful that they are now officially a Dying Race with little to no hope of restoring their numbers, ever.)
• 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.
• Supernatural: In "Survival of the Fittest", when the Leviathan delegates are preparing to take over the world and turn humanity into drugged, docile cattle for them to farm, their leader mentions Florida has been set aside for the cattle breeding program.
• Survivors (1975). In "Corn Dolly", Charles believes that the British Isles' post-plague population, which he estimates at approximately 10,000, is so small that they may all die out within two or three generations. To prevent this from happening, he impregnates four of the women in his community, Lorraine, Isla, Tessa and Florence, and wants to do the same to Abby. Abby, Jenny and Greg are appalled and decide to leave and never come back. Charles tries to convince Jenny to remain and have a baby with Greg or any other man. He is desperate as Tessa and Florence both died from eating diseased fish and he is not certain whether Lorraine and Isla's pregnancies will be viable but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Later, when Charles was brought back as a main character, he seemed to have dropped this plan and instead was concentrating on rebuilding society and uniting the surviving people.
• In Underground (WGN), we get several mentions of breeding farms where enslaved women are forced to produce a future generation of slaves, having up to a dozen children that are sold off immediately after birth. One character, Henry came from one of these farms.
• The Witcher (2019): Queen Kalis of Lyria complains that her husband sees her as "a fleshy contraption for squeezing out heirs". To make matters worse, the king wants a male heir and hires an assassin to kill Kalis after she delivers another daughter.
• World on Fire: Gertha and other "pure Aryan" German girls get recruited for having babies with chosen SS men in the Lebensborn program. Their worth for the Reich is solely about this-after giving birth they have to give up the baby.

Music

• The entirety of Pearl Jam's music video to "Do The Evolution".

Radio

• A Gender Inverted version happens in Earthsearch. While in a Lady Land society, Darv forces one of the women to show him where the men are kept. She takes him to the suspended animation chambers where all the males are kept until needed for breeding purposes.
  Recording: Hallo. My name is Forty-One. I was born during the seventh generation and I was last activated during the hundred and tenth generation when I helped provide Karina of the Velos family with a daughter.
  • The Angels are using their human crew as this. Whenever their plans don't appear to be working, they make preparations to raise another generation under their control and kill off the previous one.

Standup Comedy

• George Carlin finds it offensive. He calls it "pumping out a unit".
  George Carlin: I also happen to like it when feminists attack these fatass housewives who think there's nothing more to life that sitting home on the telephone, drinking coffee, watching TV and pumping out a baby every nine months. P-poom, p-poom, p-poom, p-poom, p-poom... will seven be enough, Bob? ... p-poom, p-poom.
• Bill Maher has likewise attacked the celebration of a woman producing 8 or 9 babies, pointing out that "we're not repopulating after the Flood", so maybe it's time to stop celebrating this sort of thing.

Tabletop Games

• In Rocket Age the Nazis have a secret breeding program, with a lot of pure Aryan women involved, on Mercury.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: A particularly ghastly variant crops up in House of Tremere: it so happens that Clan Tremere preferred a highly organic means of creating gargoyles, namely by engineering Alvusia, a twenty-foot-tall gargoyle broodmare, and keeping her locked in the cellars. For good measure, her creators also sliced her limbs off and pulled her teeth in order to stop her from resisting the impregnation process — which involves having her stomach repeatedly sliced upon, stuffed with embryonic gargoyle, and sewn up again. Needless to say, Alvusia is in constant agony, and spends most of her time screaming. In a final insult, the gargoyles born to her are trained to revere the scientists in charge of the process as their parents and gods — leaving Alvusia regarded as little more than a convenient source of brothers and sisters by her own children.
• In Warhammer, Skaven females are still bloated baby-makers lacking intelligence or even adequate muscles to support moving their own girth out of their dens.
• Implied among the Death Corp of Krieg in Warhammer 40,000. It is not clear if the "vitae wombs" they use are Uterine Replicators or a method of modifying actual human females to drastically increase fertility, but it is considered "abhorrent" In-Universe and only barely tolerated. The end result supports a society that does nothing but crank out Death Seeker Gas Mask Mooks by the million.
  • There is actually a fairly horrific version of this buried in the lore. A Chaos Space Marine by the name of Honsou created a device called the Daemonculaba. The details are fairly graphic, but lets just say it was created as a way of rapidly producing Super Soldiers and the nicest part involved forced reverse C-Section.

Video Games

• Aliens vs. Predator (2010): The "Matriarch" Xenomorph Queen is a tragic example when one thinks about it. She's been subjected to this by both the ancient Predator civilization and now in the modern era for Weyland Yutani, the two using her eggs to breed new Xenomorphs to duel against and to research and exploit, respectively.
• This is the implication of the evidence found on Half-Ogre Island in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, which shows that the half-ogres are the result of monstrous breeding camps between Half Ogres and females of other species, mostly humans and elves, which always resulted in death for the female. There were also experiments between female ogres and male humans which for obvious reasons did not lead to death, but these rarely yielded any offspring. Regardless, the evidence mysteriously disappears later on. The operation was supposedly created by a conspiracy of gnomes who uses it to breed Half Ogre bodyguards for their criminal operations.
• In Catherine, this is Dumuzid's motivation. He wants men who will continue to populate the planet, and so he decides to do this by using a succubus to weed out men who reach a certain age without getting married and making babies.
• The trope is deconstructed in Clock Tower 3. Alyssa Hamilton discovers that she comes from a long line of women called Rooders, the only people capable of defeating horrific monsters called Entities. The problem is that Rooder powers peak at age fifteen and vanish by age twenty. As such, Rooders inevitably marry as soon as they're able and try to produce a daughter as quickly as possible so that there will always be someone on Earth capable of fighting the Entities. Unlike other examples, though, the women do this out of a sense of personal obligation, not compulsion (it's never stated that any of them are forced to have children—they do so willingly to keep up the fight), and presumably choose partners that they actually love.
• Actually subverted in Crusader Kings II. While nearly every combination of ethnicity, religion, and government type in the game is patriarchal, it's possible for a character's wife to be more than just a way to produce heirs. They can be appointed to a number of court positions, particularly the role of spymaster, and female rulers can and do happen (though they're mechanically disadvantaged). With the Holy Fury DLC, the trope can even be inverted - any Pagan faith that takes the Enatic Clans doctrine can only have female-only or female-preference succession (neither of which are normally available), blocks granting titles to men who aren't already landed vassals, bars men from the council and minor titles, including military commandership, allows women to take men as consorts, whether they want it or not, and flips the gender of all the summon courtier decisions. The end result of this is that men no longer have any significant function in society, or at least noble society, beyond their role in providing genetic material to enable reproduction, and as a secondary advisory role to their wife.
• Brood Mothers from Dragon Age are this plus a Mook Maker boss. Their creation is a pretty big example of Body Horror: female captives of darkspawn are usually made into broodmothers. They contract the Taint by being force-fed darkspawn tissue until they both mutate and develop cannibalistic urges, bloating significantly as they devour massive amounts of flesh, even from their own kin. The race of the broodmother is how the type of darkspawn she will give birth to is determined, but each one is capable of spawning thousands, at twenty or so per breeding.
• In Dota 2, the character Oracle's background lore describes that he was created in The Ivory Incubarium, a place where Oracles were specially made to order (presumably in exchange for money) for use as advisors to kings, by 'Pallid Sybils who bred and birthed them'.
• Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas believes that the only worth women have is to create more Legionaries. However, in Caesar's case, this is less sexism and more simply raw pragmatism in how he feels women are more useful as breeding chambers rather than fighters. Note that he sees men as only useful as slave soldiers. Everyone is a slave under Caesar.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses it is mentioned that some noble families, as well as some commoners, only seek out women who have a crest for the possibility that they will pass on their crest to their children. The third wave DLC reveals that this would have been Mercedes’ fate. When she and her mother fled the Bartels family, her half brother Emile stayed behind in the hopes that her step father wouldn't seek her and her mother out. When he found out that Mercedes and her mother were living in a church, and the her mother was past the age to bear children, he intended to marry Mercedes to produce more crest babies. This caused Emile to snap, and he wiped out the entire Bartels family, leading to the creation of his split personality, the Death Knight.
• 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, and if a female was too young, the doctors would resort to pumping them full of artificial hormones to make them mature faster. 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. Pregnancy is mandatory at these facilities, and the people in charge don't care how it happens. Naturally, many fans consider this part of the setting (created whole-cloth by Karen Traviss) something to be ignored if at all possible.
• Light-heartedly referenced in Half-Life 2 Episode One when Alyx suddenly realizes that Dr. Kleiner, during one of his propaganda broadcasts, is encouraging people to "get busy" in order to repopulate.
• In Last Dream, a plaque on the wall of Pandora Castle elevates "mothers of five or more males" to a higher status than common soldiers.
• In Mass Effect, the Krogan can reproduce thousands of children very quickly. While among galactic society, they are the biggest, toughest and most aggressive species there is, on their homeworld Tuchanka, they were basically the equivalent of rabbits. It becomes a plot point in the entire series regarding the genophage. Once taken out of the hostile environment of Tuchanka and colonizing garden worlds, the birth rate went out of control and they started aggressively colonizing other species' worlds, kicking off the Krogan rebellions. The genophage was deployed to put an end to it. If Shepard cures the Krogan of it, Wrex boasts he'd be surprised how fast the females can churn them out. If Eve is alive, she'll tartly correct Wrex and let Shepard know that the galaxy doesn't have to worry about another Krogan rebellion.
  • Referenced in Mass Effect 2; an asari (a species that can mate with any species to produce children,) is considering whether or not to marry a krogan (who have been hit with said genophage that makes most of them incapable of having children with their own species,) and wonders if her boyfriend sees her as a "baby-making machine", since he seemed briefly surprised when she told him that any children they had would be asari rather than krogan, though he quickly assured her he'd love them anyway. You have the choice to advise her whether or not to trust that he loves her as a person or to break up with him because she doesn't trust him. If you advise her to marry him then Mass Effect 3 reveals that he did very much love her for who she was, and she was pregnant with his child at the time of his horrible death.
• 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 off world colony to help with re-population.
• 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.
• Pikmin: Bulborbs, common enemies in the series, are not people, but they still amble around after food, nap during the day, and are dangerous and energetic at night. Except for the Empress Bulblaxes, which have enormously distended abdomens so swollen that their feet don't touch the ground. Unlike every other Bulborb, rather than chasing and biting attackers she can only roll and thrash and continuously give birth. This is not the natural state of female Bulborbs — it happens to the largest one in a given range in response to environmental changes — like, perhaps, Pikmin-sized Captains showing up and making the food do weird things.
• Sword of the Stars:
  • The Zuul females are non-sentient, aggressive, and usually always pregnant. Whats worse is that since they are artificially made the race that made them did this on purpose. The Suul'ka are assholes like that.
  • The Prestor Zuul try to avert this as much as possible. They can't do anything as of right now to make the female more intelligent but they treat them much better then the regular Zuul.
• The page quote originates from a bit of flavor text you can find in Wolfenstein: The New Order, and stems from both the Nazi's own reputed "breeding program", and fits the German belief of the time that a woman should occupy herself with Kitchen, Kurche unt Kinder — that is, Kitchen, Church, and Child-rearing. Obersturmbanfuhrer Frau Engel also mentions at one point that she's served the Reich as a good German woman should, birthing half a dozen "Aryan" children for it.

Webcomics

• Demonseed Redux: Many captured angels and lesser demons are forced to produce armies of demon eggs for the coming holy war.
• There's an NSFW webcomic titled Goblin Treasure that revolves an adventurer named Darren, who at the beginning cleared out a goblin nest with another member of his guild, and when they find a female goblin, Darren's companion says he'll cut her head off and mount it as a trophy in his house since female goblins are rare to find, only for Darren to say he wants to take her with him. Back in his home, Darren immediately starts using her as a living sex toy, though as the story progresses, he starts regretting mistreating her, and after naming her Gobu he starts thinking of setting her free. When they encounter a goblin hunting party, he asks Gobu if she wants to go with the male goblins and become part of their nest, but she refuses, insisting that she wants to stay with him. Just then, the goblin hunting party is wiped out by a woman named Sally, who when she sees Gobu, rushes over to her and Darren, and introduces herself as a goblin biologist. Sally explains that she's surprised to see a female goblin out and about, especially one in such good health as Gobu, and when Darren calls her out on killing the goblins that wanted to rescue Gobu, Sally says that the goblins had no intention rescuing her. Sally states that the male goblins planed to kill Darren, steal anything of value, and force Gobu back to their nest to breed with all the male goblins. Sally then asserts that the reason why seeing a female goblin is so rare is because they die young as a result of neglect from being forced to keep mating in order to produce newer generations of goblins, as well as from neglect due to being forced to stay in the nest with little to no food.

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: Played with. In order to increase the number of children with the Bloodline trait, and increase the number of mutants in their families overall, the Bloodline set up a People Farm project aboard the airship Jules Verne... but instead of kidnapping women for the breeding program, they hire Exemplar women between the ages of 18 and 25 as surrogate mothers, paying them well and covering all of their medical expenses (there is even talk of offering college scholarships), and they only stay at the facility until their child is born (they only contract to have a single child). The children are then fostered to Bloodline members and given the best treatment and education available. While the protagonists still find the idea repulsive (understandably so, especially given how Envy first found out about the place), the women they talk to insist it was a good deal for them, as they were generally in desperate financial straits before the offer came along, the facilities at the Baby Farm are lavish, and the pay is excellent.
• This is the big twist revealed at the end of Borrasca. As a result of iron ore leaking out into the town of Drisking's water table after the town's mines were blown up, most of the people became infertile. As a result, the people running the baby farm, which is called Borrasca, came up with the solution to kidnap fertile women and girls to impregnate and then sell the babies to the infertile townspeople so they could raise families again. This is the town of Drisking's dark secret that has been going on for decades by the time the story begins, and when the women become too sick or old to bear healthy children, they are put through an ore refinery (called the Shiny Gentleman) in order to dispose of them.

Western Animation

• The Legend of Korra: before Harmonic Convergence, which brings with it a host of new airbenders, Tenzin seems to see his wife Pema as this. While he loves and respects her, he thinks it is his responsibility to bring back the Air Nation as the last airbender in the world. So, he has lots of children with Pema, who as an air acolyte is someone he's confident that will be able to give birth to airbenders. She even laments on this at one point.
  Pema: All I want is one child like me, a nice nonbender who doesn't blast wind in my face every five seconds.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Implied; Mewman society is completely matriarchal where only females have legitimate political and magical power, so the only way for a man to gain power is to marry the ruling Butterfly Queen. Many Queens see men as little more than a way to secure a successor, and the Queens' husbands themselves are barely mentioned, with Comet's being divorced. Queen Solaria is one example who actively has a dim view of men, seeing kings as being only good for looking pretty and siring female heirs. The episode "Game of Flags" reveals that a Butterfly Queen can dissolve a marriage anytime she wants, with the husband having absolutely no say in the matter.

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