1. If you take babies away from their mothers at birth, you need to feed them. There's no suggestion that they use wet-nurses. There's no indication that there are goats and cows being kept for their milk. You do catch a glimpse of some powdery formula with no information on ingredients -- but powdered formula has to be reconstituted with water, and water used for formula has to be really clean. I remember having some specific reasons for doubting that the enclave would have a water purification plant, but I can't tell you now what they were.
2. It is a major plot point that the hemophilia gene is present in the enclave, and killing a lot of kids. The problem is that in the real world, hemophilia would be killing just boys, creating a serious gender imbalance that presumably the enclave would rectify by specifically taking boy babies. You actually see a girl with hemophilia at some point. For a girl to get hemophilia, she needs to have a father who HAS hemophilia plus a mother who's a carrier. Which is extremely unlikely to happen in a world where medical care for hemophiliacs is taboo -- the boys born with it will mostly die before they reach adulthood. There is a non-sex-linked form but it is much less severe. Anyway, she could have picked a different genetic disease (there are loads, and plenty are not sex-linked) or she could have explored the ramifications of losing so many boy children, and either of these would have worked for me.
My foggy recollection is that medical care in this world is kind of generally taboo because Only The Strong Should Survive. Plus there are some practical issues involving their limited technology, even in the enclave.
1. If you take babies away from their mothers at birth, you need to feed them. There's no suggestion that they use wet-nurses. There's no indication that there are goats and cows being kept for their milk. You do catch a glimpse of some powdery formula with no information on ingredients -- but powdered formula has to be reconstituted with water, and water used for formula has to be really clean. I remember having some specific reasons for doubting that the enclave would have a water purification plant, but I can't tell you now what they were.
2. It is a major plot point that the hemophilia gene is present in the enclave, and killing a lot of kids. The problem is that in the real world, hemophilia would be killing just boys, creating a serious gender imbalance that presumably the enclave would rectify by specifically taking boy babies. You actually see a girl with hemophilia at some point. For a girl to get hemophilia, she needs to have a father who HAS hemophilia plus a mother who's a carrier. Which is extremely unlikely to happen in a world where medical care for hemophiliacs is taboo -- the boys born with it will mostly die before they reach adulthood. There is a non-sex-linked form but it is much less severe. Anyway, she could have picked a different genetic disease (there are loads, and plenty are not sex-linked) or she could have explored the ramifications of losing so many boy children, and either of these would have worked for me.
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in a world where medical care for hemophiliacs is taboo
In the hope that they'd all die out, to stop transmission of the gene? Or just randomly?
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My foggy recollection is that medical care in this world is kind of generally taboo because Only The Strong Should Survive. Plus there are some practical issues involving their limited technology, even in the enclave.
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