Rationalize this with a perfected method of medically induced coma
An induced coma – also known as a medically induced coma (MIC), barbiturate-induced coma, or drug-induced coma – is a temporary coma (a deep state of unconsciousness) brought on by a controlled dose of an anesthetic drug, often a barbiturate such as pentobarbital or thiopental. Other intravenous anesthetic drugs such as midazolam or propofol may be used.
Drug-induced comas are used to protect the brain during major neurosurgery, as a last line of treatment in certain cases of status epilepticus that have not responded to other treatments, and in refractory intracranial hypertension following traumatic brain injury. Source
There are problems with "brain dead." Dead is dead. You can hook the body up to a machine, but you can't keep it going forever (at least we don't know how to do that today), so it's really undesirable to actually "kill" the person. You just want the person to go away. This can be done with a medically induced coma, which leaves the brain's ability to control the body inherently in place, but the personality is out of the way and not developing.
However, there are problems even with this:
Induced coma usually results in significant systemic adverse effects. The patient is likely to completely lose respiratory drive and require mechanical ventilation; gut motility is reduced; hypotension can complicate efforts to maintain cerebral perfusion pressure and often requires the use of vasopressor drugs. Hypokalemia often results. The completely immobile patient is at increased risk of bed sores as well as infection from catheters. (Ibid.)
No matter how perfectly you remove the cognitive brain function, you're stuck with some nasty side effects that could compromise your final story. Brain dead or comatose people don't move.
Within a week, your problems only get worse. You see, normally, your muscles and bones help support your weight under gravity. But now that you're lying down, they're out of a job. And as the saying goes, if you don't use 'em, you lose 'em. For every week in bed, you lose about 1% of your bone density, making your bones more brittle and easy to fracture. (Source)
Go read that entire article, that quote only describes one problem. Granted, the article is about staying permanently in bed and you might hang your dead babies up... but the truth comes out in that statement, "if you don't use 'em, you lose 'em." You might try to use something like electrical stimulation, and it would work... to a degree..., but what you won't have twenty years later are particularly healthy organs. In fact, the whole body would be pretty substandard because, in a nutshell, it never really gets used. Bodies need to do things to develop healthy organs.
So, though this sounds devastatingly ruthless and may offend some readers (for which I'm very sorry!), what you really want to induce isn't a state of brain dead, you want to induce a severe mental retardation
I assume you're chasing this idea for its shock value. But this usually means there's some intrepid adventurers who open the proverbial door to discover (gasp!) a room full of dead people hanging or stacked there waiting to be harvested for organs so the ruling elite or wealthy can continue to live happy lives. Frankly, this would have been a better premise than what was used for the movie The Island, but I digress.
Personally, I think a greater shock value (and a more believable process that experiences fewer problems) is, at birth, to introduce severe mental retardation.
Severe Mental Retardation is defined by the presence of significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning as well as significant limitations in adaptive functioning (adaptive behavior) present prior to the age of 18 years. Individuals with a diagnosis of severe mental retardation generally obtain IQ scores within the range of 20–25 to 35–40.
The goal is to have a happy child that jumps and plays and runs around and does healthy things, but is nevertheless one that is intrinsically perceived (and is) a burden on society as the individual will never be a significant contributor (other than as a passive organ donor), but rather always a dependent.
If you're not wiggling around in your chair right now trying to figure out how to chastise me for even suggesting this... you're one cold-hearted <redacted>.
The government doesn't just warehouse the bodies, there's an entire welfare system set up with a large bureaucracy to manage the growth and health of the children. I'm thinking classic Russian closed cities where the children (and their harvesting) are kept out of the public's eye.
Maybe it's just me, but I think this is a deeper, darker, more evil secret than a room full of dead bodies. A brain dead child had something evil done to them only once. These kids experience evil in the form of smiling healthcare workers day after day after day with no conception that a day will come when they're finally killed.
I love the idea... how could it be rationalized?
Anytime something interferes with normal brain development, intellectual disability can result. However, a specific cause for intellectual disability can only be pinpointed about a third of the time.
The most common causes of intellectual disability are:
- Genetic conditions. These include things like Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome.
- Problems during pregnancy. Things that can interfere with fetal brain development include alcohol or drug use, malnutrition, certain infections, or preeclampsia.
- Problems during childbirth. Intellectual disability may result if a baby is deprived of oxygen during childbirth or is born extremely premature.
- Illness or injury. Infections like meningitis, whooping cough, or the measles can lead to intellectual disability. Severe head injury, near-drowning, extreme malnutrition, infections in the brain, exposure to toxic substances such as lead, and severe neglect or abuse can also cause it.
- None of the above. In two-thirds of all children who have intellectual disabilities, the cause is unknown. (Source)
I'm a fan of not trying to explain everything. Honestly, authors open themselves to more criticism by trying to realistically explain everything than they ever would if they left some of the details to the imagination. In other words, as useful as those bullets might be, it's the last one that's the most useful. Generally speaking, humanity has no honking clue how severe mental retardation occurs.
But your government does.
Your government knows...
Where in the brain damage influence must be brought to bear to completely inhibit cognitive development.
The chemical that permanently disrupts synaptic growth. Let's call it Oclordex (name generated via Drug-O-Matic).
The medical technology and/or procedure to deliver the chemical such that the personality is affected, but not the brain's ability to control the body.
Do you remember the scene from Will Smith's I, Robot when Susan Calvin injects a robot's positronic brain with nanites, which flow through the brain, destroying it? Yeah. Now imagine cutting open a baby's head and carefully inserting needles into the folds of his/her brain to gently spray specific areas with Oclordex. (I'd tell you to do this in the Frontal Lobe, but that's become such a scifi trope....) Said procedure performed by either a pure sociopath or a true believer (go watch the movie Serenity).
My point is, it's not specifically important how the government achieves this goal. It's important to know the nature of the people who would order it and do it. Shock doesn't come from (as an example) knowing the chemical composition of Oclordex. Shock comes from compelling the reader to think to themselves, "there's a bit of that darkness in me...."
