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| Sweet penetration in 2050. |
We are in for a bright sunny future without abortion, according to the father of The Pill. In an interview with The Telegraph, headlined by Sex will soon be just for fun, not babies, the Pill Father proclaimed the golden age to come.
Prof Carl Djerassi, the Austrian-American chemist and author, said he believes that the Pill will become obsolete because men and women will choose to freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised.
He also claims it will end abortions, as no children will be unplanned or unwanted.
The big reason this will happen is that women will, at a young age, choose to preempt the problems incumbent to life itself by planning on in vitro fertilization.
"Women in their twenties will first choose this approach as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions or the absence of the right partner or the inexorably ticking of the biological clock.
“However I predict that many of these women will in fact decide to be fertilised by IVF methods because of the advances in genetic screening. And once that happens then IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children."Non-coital reproduction. Sounds meaningful and satisfying.
Ah, how wide is the gap between "reproducing" and "having children". Dr. Djerassi says "having children", but he means reproducing. Like frogs and salmon and kangaroos fulfilling a biological need. There are many humans in this l'il ol' world of ours who see children as either an irresponsible luxury or an inconvenience. These people are headed into the world that Dr. Djerassi projects. But the rest of us are not. And the rest of us are most of us.
There is more to having children than fertilization, birthing, and caretaking. There is conception, labor, delivery (beautifully giving light in many languages), raising, educating. "Having children" is a complex, each part inextricable from the others. Women who wait until they're in their thirties and feel their biological clock ticking usually want more than just a child. They want a home and a loving husband. But many of them can't have those things, so they settle for reproduction.
Sex is also part of a complex. It is not just for reproduction or just for fun. You can't have a spouse without sex. You can't have a marriage without sex. You can't have a home without sex. You can't have children without sex. You can't have a family without sex.
Sure, sex is fun. But fun's not why I fuck. And it's not why my wife does either. I could go on for pages about why we have sex, but fun wouldn't show up on those pages. It's such a light and cheap word next to things like contentment, peace, joy, communion, understanding, affection, love, giving, et alia.
It is important that we Christians maintain our distinctiveness as a people of Love and Life. It is important that we not fuck for fun, but for effect. The effect of changing and saving the world. Seriously. Next time you gently lay your wife down and do to her those tender things you do, remember that you're doing the Lord's work. You're saving the world.
The kingdom that Dr. Djerrasi proclaimed is coming, but it is only a pretender to Christ's throne. The Church must and will stand against it. And society will be split into two:
the people who fuck for fun, and the people who fuck for real.
No abortions sounds fabulous. The rest of it sounds horrifying.
ReplyDeletePodkyne of Mars sort of had this. But they froze the embryos/ babies. They made the babies the regular way.
However, I think the good Dr. is overestimating the Great God Science a bit. In vitro is really, really expensive and inefficient and I don't really see a good reason why it would vastly improve in the next 35 years.
Also genetics isn't nearly as simple as people thought. Yeah they've mapped the genome. Only to discover that gene sequences are only the beginning of the story. People don't really have a good grasp on what makes humans and I don't really see how we ever will. Right now biologists can't make models because the math is too hardcore. They can't even handle the amount of data they generate.
As to screening. I'm not familiar with any advances that would suddenly make screening fast cheap and efficient. Just taking something like cystic fibrosis, which is relatively well studied/ understood. Yes 90% + of the cases in the US have one mutation. But there are like 140 other mutations that have the same phenotype. And these are single point mutations. How are you ever going to screen a baby for all of that?
As to no unwanted babies; I assume he's talking about tubal ligation and vastectomies as the means of sterilization. Both of these can spontaneously reverse. Granted the changes will be small, but not zero.