The Price of Motherhood

When people think of a mother they think of a comforter, a lover, and a role model. Today, most women’s dream is to become a phenomenal mother: being someone their child, and even observers, can look up to. What if a woman is denied her dreams of becoming a mother, or even compelled to think being a mother is indecent? Suppose people of the world are conditioned to believe the words “birth” and “mother” are obscene, and the only mothers existing in the world were called “savages.” Would one’s dreams be crushed as a result of the absence of motherhood? Would she feel like something is missing in her life without the love of a child? In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the unpleasant feelings toward births and mothers are universal. To be living in a world which is “perfect,” there are many imperfections because of the lack of a mother’s love.

The term “reproduction” is typically used to describe mothers and fathers producing a child naturally, but in Brave New World, the term is used to describe the manufacture of humans in factories. The Director of Hatcheries (D.H.C.) explains the process to a group of students:

One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress. (Huxley 7)

With the Bokanovsky Process, a woman is incapable of having a child of her own and forbidden to have a natural birth. Also, this process creates a caste system. The system consists of Alphas, Betas, Gamma, Deltas, and Epsilons.

The Alphas and Betas are the highest classes. In the Bokanovsky Proces...

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... spoke very sharply. ‘Don’t say that. There’s very little honor in that Assignment.” (Lowry 21). The mother’s reaction shows the extremity of hatred for motherhood is present in many novels’ societies.

Whether in an unstable or stable society, mothers and births should always be present. Motherhood might make a woman insane, but in time the child makes her sane. In Brave New World ? A Defense of Paradise-Engineering, David Pearce states the overall reason for Ford’s beliefs on motherhood and birth: “…it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love" (Pearce). Is the price of true motherhood, home, family, freedom, and love worth the reward of false happiness? When there is motherhood, home, family, freedom, and love, there is happiness.