Birthright: A Near-Future Novel

A country votes on banning natural birth—and for one young woman, it's about to become the most personal question of her life.Europe, 2096. After the collapse of global birthrates, nearly every child is born in an artificial womb and raised in state-run Centers designed to optimize development and eliminate uncertainty. Those born the old way are slowly disappearing.Grace is finishing her final year at a Center. Her meticulously guided life has been building toward a future mapped out before she arrived in the world. Mostly. Until she is gifted a banned book, and the questions she starts asking aren’t ones the system is prepared to reopen.On a school trip to Natural-Born District 1, she meets Tom. His world is full of things she has only read about: families built on warmth and choice, streets overtaken by wild green, futures that aren’t prewritten. She starts breaking the rules to see more of it. And of him. It costs her—friendships, safety, and every assumption she had about what the system’s care actually means.When a charismatic minister drives a referendum to ban natural birth entirely—“for the children’s sake”—Grace makes a discovery she cannot share with anyone. Something she cannot ignore. Something she cannot undo.Now everything—her bond with Tom, her freedom, her body—is on a collision course with a vote she cannot stop and a system that has already made up its mind.If banning natural birth promised a better life for everyone—would you vote yes?For readers of The Handmaid’s Tale, Station Eleven, and Klara and the Sun.