Sex in 2050: Purely Recreational
By 2050 we will all live in a Utopian society, use hover boards and have sex for purely recreational purposes without fear of pregnancy. Okay, so maybe I made up the first two, but stunningly the third is a genuine likelihood according to the maker of the contraceptive pill.
According to Metro, Austrian-American chemist Carl Djerassi, 91, has predicted that his own invention, the pill, will become outdated in the near future. Instead, men and women will freeze their eggs and sperm when young and get sterilized. Sex will be for recreation only. If women want to have babies, they’ll choose IVF methods to become fertilized. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a process by which an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body: in vitro (“in glass”). Some negatively refer to this method of fertilization as a “Test Tube Baby” as they believe it goes against the laws of physics and a higher being.
Regardless, IVF may very well be the future as it is much safer for the baby as well as the mother. Abortion will be a thing of the past as unwanted pregnancies will no longer be an issue. The freezing of younger sperm and eggs will result in healthier babies for whenever that man or woman decided to reproduce. Bionews quotes Djerassi saying “… IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children. Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilization’s will occur among fertile women than the current five million fertility-impaired ones. For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 per cent.”
The controversy surrounding this method is not the practicality or success of it, but rather a moral battle. Is it “right” to impregnate a woman by way of science and to essentially use sterilization as a form of birth control? Is it “right” to have a baby in the traditional way, and risk serious complications that could have been avoided? For those bookworms like me out there, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” tackles these issues with great finesse. It shows an extremely rigid society in which IVF is prominent. These similarities certainly make me curious to find out as to how accurate Huxley’s theories may have been about the future.
It will be a slow process, but eventually as a society we will stop asking if it is right or wrong and start asking if it is sensible and genuinely for the good.
