This week, Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the contraceptive pill, offered us his vision of a future of reproduction without sex. By 2050, he said, many young men and women will take a decision to be sterilised, having removed and frozen the seeds of their potential future children.
For women who are students, academics or on an unforgiving career path, those who haven’t found the “right” partner with whom to start a family, or people who want to make the most of their twenties and thirties as individuals or couples by not reproducing during these fertile years, Djerassi’s projection looks to a post-contraceptive future in which we will not so much decide when to avoid pregnancy but on what terms to embrace it.
In the biological sense, sex will take on a distinctly nonreproductive function. Instead, it will default to its other key role for us primates – for establishing and maintaining relationships, for pair bonding, for fun.
In some ways, this may be something to look forward to, a new liberation. Djerassi’s is a future of sexuality rather than sex; it offers a welcome silence from the increasingly deafening tick of the biological clock – a chance for women to have the greater leisure in reproduction that nature reserves for men. Though (in the absence of an artificial womb) women will still carry, deliver, and spend the early months as the most likely primary carer of a child, being able to indefinitely delay pregnancy could alleviate the pressure to reproduce, which can destroy relationships. This change in approach to reproduction could also help address the staggering dearth of women on the upper rungs of almost every institution: governments, industries, the media and academia.
Will this be something all women do? It would, after all, mean an intense medicalisation of women’s lives, and involve undergoing a process that is currently unnecessary for otherwise fertile women who choose to have children while they are young. There is also the question of costs, which, although they may in future plummet, could limit participation, even for the willing. And for those not willing? Will pressure from employers or others turn what is now an option into an ethically and morally fraught obligation?
Djerassi suggests this will prevent abortion and unwanted pregnancy, which is technically true. But there are other considerations. For example, embryos freeze much better than eggs do, so one temptation might be for a happy couple in their twenties to cement their commitment by creating embryos for a future in which their careers are settled and a home secured. Of course, there is always the chance that their embryos may outlive their romance, or that one partner will want to use their embryos against the other’s wishes. Abandoned embryos may offer the chance of a “technological” adoption to those who fail to become pregnant using their own sperm and eggs; some, perhaps, will be offered to medical research.
On a more practical note, the technologies upon which Carl Djerassi’s reproductive scenario are predicated are not perfect yet – nor may they be by 2050. Advances in genetic screening that will make it better, cheaper, faster and more widely available may certainly contribute to the creation of healthy embryos (perhaps even healthier than the lottery of “natural” pregnancy), as Djerassi also envisions. But as it stands, even in his version of carefully planned reproduction without sex, men still have the upper hand in that, like embryos, sperm do far better when frozen than eggs.
Compared with sperm, eggs are complex, and their structure and the volume of liquid they contain mean they are susceptible to damage when frozen. There have been vast improvements in freezing methods, which reduce this damage, and some in the field of reproductive biology are even looking forward to one day preserving them dry, at room temperature. Still, if as Djerassi says putting all our eggs in one cryo-basket will be the way of the future, there are hurdles that need to be carefully navigated to ensure that they will still be intact enough once thawed, so that in the quest to assure ourselves of a family, women are not inadvertently destroying what could be their only shot at not just a child, but a healthy child.
I do look forward to a future in which my daughter will not be faced with the same career-life dilemmas I have had. But though I, like Djerassi, feel that the future of reproduction will undoubtedly be mediated by the best that technology will have to offer, I am also convinced that there are social changes to the testosterone-fuelled structures of our institutions that must also play an important part, so that women will no longer, four decades from now, still be drawing the short straw.
