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.

Mobile America

Michael Barone has a wonderful, dare I say, important peice on the movement of people in America. Now, America has always been a mobile society stretching as far back as colonial times. But Barone takes a closer look at some of the largest metro areas in America and notes that the really big cities are losing domestic (that is native born Americans) population, being replaced and supplemented by immigrants. While many of the booming cities are attracting more domestic inflow and these booming cities, largely is the South, Mid-Atlantic and the West (but not California), are driving the economy and are projected to gain sets in the 2010 reapportionment. And oh, yeah, the vote Republican.

Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole.

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The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Democratic politicians like to decry what they describe as a widening economic gap in the nation. But the part of the nation where it is widening most visibly is their home turf, the place where they win their biggest margins (these metro areas voted 61% for John Kerry) and where, in exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartments and Beverly Hills mansions with immigrant servants passing the hors d'oeuvres, they raise most of their money.

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The nation's center of gravity is shifting: Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee. State capitals that were just medium-sized cities dominated by government employees in the 1950s--Sacramento, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Richmond--are now booming centers of high-tech and other growing private-sector businesses. San Antonio has more domestic than immigrant inflow even though the border is only three hours' drive away. The Interior Boomtowns generated 38% of the nation's population growth in 2000-06.

This is another political world from the Coastal Megalopolises: the Interior Boomtowns voted 56% for George W. Bush in 2004. Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Nevada--states dominated by Interior Boomtowns--are projected to pick up 10 House seats in the 2010 Census.

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Twenty years ago political analysts grasped the implications of the vast movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, a tilting of the table on balance toward Republicans; but with California leaning heavily to Democrats, that paradigm seems obsolete. What's now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.
Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation's fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That's the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.

Read the whole thing.