Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

The usefulness of the adaptations that sex or inbreeding can provide assume that we must adapt to our environment to survive. For many humans living today, however, adaptation works the other way round. With the benefit of modern medicines and technology, we are increasingly able to adapt our environments to ourselves. Yet, in our globalized world, in which populations are mixing more than ever before, and offer less of the protections of inbreeding as a result, diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS are among the leading causes of death. Both killers are caused by pathogens similar to Plasmodium in that they might be thwarted if a person possesses particular co-dominant or recessive genes – that is, by adopting the accelerated genetic resistance that comes from inbreeding. But sex is not designed to benefit the individual; it is designed to benefit the population. That is, in a nutshell, why it became such a popular strategy in nature. For most animals, the benefits to the species gained through sex are so great that they would only ever reproduce without sex under the most extreme conditions.

Men and women considering having a family will likely be thinking more about the individual benefits, costs, and consequences than the survival of the species. If humans had the option of reproducing without sex, would we do it that way? What sorts of extreme conditions might make us seek a virgin birth?

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DESPERATELY SEEKING A VIRGIN BIRTH

Some people assert, and positively assert, that a female mouse by licking salt can become pregnant without the intervention of the male.

Aristotle, Historia Animalium, 350 BCE

Emmimarie Jones is thirty years old and completely absorbed in her domestic life, like any typically busy housewife. She has one daughter, eleven-year-old Monica, who is a happy English schoolgirl. Despite the utter normality of their daily experience, the mother and daughter seem somewhat strange to those who meet them. They share the same likes and dislikes regarding people, food, and clothes. And they share an uncanny physical resemblance.

Monica must have been conceived in the summer of 1944, when her mother was being treated for rheumatism in a women’s hospital in Hanover, in Emmimarie’s native Germany. Emmimarie recovered, but three months after she left the ward, her weakness returned. So she visited a doctor, intending to come away with a tonic to cure her ills. The consultation did not go as she had imagined. After examining her, the doctor said he was not surprised that she was feeling unusually tired – she would be, since she was pregnant. She smiled momentarily, in disbelief; she was sure he had made a stupid mistake. Emmimarie knew the facts of life, and she knew she had not been with a man. In fact, at the time she was supposed to have become pregnant, she was confined to the hospital, surrounded only by women – patients and staff.

Emmimarie insisted to the doctor that all she needed was a pick-me-up – some vitamins, perhaps, to help her feel a little less run-down. But the doctor was firm. He told Emmimarie that she would soon see that he was right.

Six months later, Emmimarie crawled out of the deep underground cellars where she had been sheltering from the Allies’ bombing of Hanover. During the attack, her home had been destroyed and the city flattened for miles around, leaving a landscape of ruins. The draughty cellar would prove a difficult place to carry a child, but now she had nowhere else to go; it was her home. Her baby, Monica, spent the first two years of life underground.

After the war, Emmimarie married a Welsh soldier stationed in Germany with the Royal Engineers. When his service there ended, he took mother and child back with him to Britain. And it was in Britain that Emmimarie found herself embroiled in an international news exclusive.

The front-page headline of the Sunday Pictorial of 6 November 1955 shouted that virgin births were no myth, and a scientist could prove it. Find the Case, it commanded. Emmimarie could not believe her eyes. Here, finally, was a chance to uncover the truth about the circumstances of Monica’s birth. She nervously put pen to paper, and wrote to the researcher quoted in the article:

Dear Madam

For ten year I have been wondering and worried about the Birth of my Daughter. I honestly belief that she has no father. If you care to have allthe facts please let me know. Before you write to me I must tell you that I am German in case you don’t want anything to do with a German. I am married to a Welshman and have been inEngland over seven years.

Yours Sincerely

Emmimarie Jones

The letter was to reach the desk of a geneticist named Helen Spurway, also known as ‘Britain’s blonde biologist’, the woman who had first grabbed the tabloid’s attention.

Late in 1955, while working as a lecturer at London’s University College, Spurway had found what she considered to be conclusive evidence that males were not necessary for making babies. Her conclusive evidence was that if you separate female guppies from males at the time they are born, the female fish still go on to reproduce. Further, the broods these virgin females hatch are unusual – they are almost entirely female. How could this be possible? Spurway wondered. There were only three likely explanations. One, that the mother fish somehow had contact with sperm while it was still an embryo in its own mother’s womb. Two, that the ‘female’ was in fact a hermaphrodite – an animal like earthworms, snails, and indeed other species of fish that carry both eggs and sperm and could, therefore, self-fertilize. And three, that the fish were true virgins, and had no need of males