“The Other McCain” linked today to an article in The Atlantic with five predictions about the future of reproduction:
1. triple-parent reproduction, such as uterus donation.
2. “personalized” fertility assessments (e.g., for a given woman, how do her own chances of conception decline as she ages?)
3. precise forecasting of most fertile times of the month (which is goofy — fertility awareness methods do a perfectly fine job) and sensors to monitor the unborn children conceived as a result
4. creating sperm and egg cells out of ordinary body cells, to enable two men or two women to be the genetic parents of a child, and
5. massively-expanded eugenic testing of IVF children.
Ordinarily, such an article wouldn’t even merit commenting on, as far removed from the real world as it appears to be. Even if such technologies come to pass, the vast majority of children would still be conceived of the “old-fashioned way,” and one suspects that the author is living in a “none of my friends voted for Nixon” sort of world (that is, with a very homogeneous liberal social group) if she thinks that people looking for such technology are anything but a small minority.
What would be a radical change would be an artificial womb — it would be a game-changer both in enabling women to become mothers without the inconveniences of pregnancy and would raise ethical issues, such as, does a woman have a right to abort a child if a “transplantation” to an artificial womb is an alternative?
All of this wouldn’t be a game-changer in itself, but the biggest potential development is whether these technologies push us further towards a future of “big cat” families, in which reproduction is a woman’s business, with men at the fringes.
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