Children Without Sex, Sex Without Children

Well, you can already have the latter for the most part, if you exercise some due care. What is the fun in the first proposition though?

The Daily Mail has a feature story which posits a future where people delay having children and then using lab procedures to fertilize an egg. Sex would be for pleasure only not for procreation.

One might think this Huxleyesque vision of a Brave New World just a few years from now sounds a little fantastical. Yet it is the prediction of one of the world’s most eminent scientists, Carl Djerassi.

Professor Djerassi is the man who invented the Pill, the first oral contraceptive, which triggered the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and which many would argue changed the face of society and sexual morality for ever — and not necessarily for the better.

The Pill gave us sex without children. Now Djerassi has turned that concept on its head. He believes the developed world is heading towards its next cultural revolution — children without sex.

"It is my own prediction that within the next 30 to 50 years in the Western world, many women, when young, will bank their eggs or ovarian tissue, have them frozen, and use them when they feel the time is right for them to have a child," he says. "It will become commonplace.

"The world has changed. The days are past in which women in countries like Britain have economic dependence on their husbands and take care of the children.

"The days are past when women looked after children and nothing else. Women have careers now. They are better educated, more affluent and healthier on the whole, and many are now living into their 80s.

"They postpone having children until later and then they forget — or remember too late. Soon there will be nothing to stop a woman freezing her eggs when they are at their healthiest and then using them later on in life."

Less than a decade ago, such a scenario would have seemed impossible. But even now, there are indications that Professor Djerassi’s prediction will come true. A handful of babies have already been born using frozen eggs.

There are some real ethical and moral issues invovled, leaving aside issue of religious morality. The article at least raises those concerns.

Widespread freezing of eggs, if Djerassi’s prediction is correct, is bound to prove controversial. Is it ethical for women to have children in their 60s? How will the child born using such a procedure be affected both emotionally and physically? Even today we do not know what the long-term consequences of IVF will be on those children it has helped to create.

And then, of course, there is the question of women choosing to defrost and fertilise eggs without bothering to find a partner to help raise the child. Do we really want science to create a generation of ageing mothers who’ve chosen to corrupt nature for the sake of their careers by having children late in life — with or without a man?

Djerassi is dogmatic in his rejection of these moral and social concerns. Controversially, he believes advances in egg freezing techniques would be greatly beneficial to the human race. "There are so many unwanted children in the world," he says.

"This would be a way of helping to reduce the number of unwanted children. Every child born to a woman who has taken a conscious decision to have a child at that time would be wanted and loved and properly cared for.

"Is there not something to be said for wisdom, affection and maturity? Why shouldn’t a woman have a child when she is older if the science is there to help her? Nowadays it is not thought peculiar if a man in his 50s or 60s has a child. So should it be different for a woman?"

I need to ruminate on this a little more, but my gut reaction is that while doing this might be a reasonable exception to the rule, it should remain just that, the exception.