This device is designed to replace mothers. Welcome to the horrifying, Brave New World

Will this change motherhood forever?

A student design team has come up with a concept incubator for babies that could be used in the future to grow children in the comfort of your own home. The design is an art project, but there are scientists working on an actual product that can raise babies from conception to birth, without a mother.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- In the book, "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley presented a vision of a world where motherhood was rendered obsolete. Instead of being born, children are "decanted," raised from conception in test tubes and jars of increasing size until nine months. At the end of their nine months, they emerge into a stratified society where they will be conditioned and raised to accept their predetermined roles, most as slaves. It's a heartless world of debauchery where human life is produced --and destroyed, on an industrial scale.

The story was meant to serve as a cautionary tale. Huxley warned that the trend toward industrialization of everything, the development of drugs and pills for everything, and the elimination of morals would produce a horrifying society. Since the book was written in 1931, almost everything he warned about has come to pass, except the ability to produce children outside the womb.

Scientists are working feverishly to develop artificial wombs and have already succeeded in growing lambs inside plastic bags.

This success has inspired art students at Product Design Arnhem to develop a concept incubator for the home. The incubator sits in the home, and the fertilized egg is inserted. For nine months, the mother can work and live life normally without the apparent inconvenience of being pregnant. The baby is fed through tubes and pods inserted into the device. After nine months, the baby is removed without labor and childbirth.

Experts think the technology will advance to that point within a matter of years, and given our obsession with convenience, our overdrive to work and produce, and our craven aversion to pain and inconvenience, such a device could be a big part of our future.

It's a terrible idea, even if it works perfectly. The act of carrying a baby in its first, natural home stimulates a chemical bond between mother and child. What happens to those bonds when a baby is raised artificially outside the womb? Will we develop a drug for that too?

Such a design also opens the possibility of playing God with the child's genetics and development.

The only silver lining to the idea is that it could be used to save premature babies. It could also be used to help with unwanted babies, providing an alternative to abortion. But it's an ersatz replacement for motherhood, and the best solution would be to help babies live their full term in their mother's wombs under all circumstances. 

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