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

Bringing egg and sperm together cannot, by itself, resolve all of the issues that people may face when they want to have a child but cannot. So it makes sense that, one day, possibly soon, we will expand our means of reproduction to be far broader than our current repertoire. To get a glimpse at the future of reproduction, simply think about the problems that ART has not yet resolved. Who are the Lesley and John Brown of the next phase of human history?

Thirty years after the first test-tube baby, science is poised to add many new weapons to its armoury in the battle against infertility, including using your own stem cells to generate fresh sperm or eggs or both, when you don’t have any or have run out. There may perhaps be gene therapy to prevent miscarriages from corrupt chromosomes. There is even a body of research to prepare us for reproduction in space, where sperm seem to move faster (a fertility plus) but some hormones may not be activated (a developmental negative).

Since humans first evolved, men and women have needed each other to make babies. But the nature of human reproduction is about to change radically. Children born this year will be able to make babies in ways their parents could barely dream of – when, that is, they decide to have children, at a time entirely of their own choosing.

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OUT OF TIME

There will be nothing but time, don’t you understand?... If I can have a child at seventy-three, then why should you have one at forty-three, orforty-five?

Ann Patchett, State of Wonder, 2011

The Mosuo people live high in the Himalayas, in the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, near the Tibetan border, in China. They live a primarily agrarian life, raising yak, water buffalo, sheep, and poultry. They are also one of the few peoples whose language appears to have no word for ‘father’ – perhaps the most exotic facet of their way of life, to an outsider.

The Mosuo are a matrilineal culture: it is the women who determine the family line and inherit the family property. Such practices have existed in Tibetan and northern Indian societies from Neolithic times, presumably motivated by a desire to keep wealth and resources within the kin group. These customs started to decline – or at least, to be hidden – after missionaries and colonists began to malign them in the nineteenth century. Among the Mosuo, however, maintaining a matrilineal culture grew into something of a necessity as more and more Mosuo men started to leave their villages to become monks or trade along the Silk Road.

With their men absent or unavailable, the Mosuo women took over the day-to-day administration of the community. They chose not to marry, opting instead to look after their own households, some populated with four generations of Mosuo women. At puberty, a girl would be given a private bedroom, in an otherwise open-plan home, and like a society debutante she would attend dances, looking for a suitable partner for courting. If a young man caught her fancy, the girl would be free to choose him as her lover – and not just as a lover, but as a father to one or more of her children. But their relationship was temporary; the man might be allowed to stay the night, but in the morning he would go back to his own dwelling, to live with his own mother’s line. There was no requirement – no expectation – that the father would stick around.

These so-called walking marriages involve none of the messy elements of a long-term partnership. There is no divorce, no joint-property disputes, no custody battles. In this way, new generations would be born and the missing men would be replenished, with the village remaining peaceful under the watchful eyes of the mothers.

Walking marriages may appear to sanction promiscuity among young Mosuo women, but these arrangements are more like a form of serial monogamy, which is widely and happily practised across the Western world. The main difference here is that in a Mosuo village there is no stigma attached to single motherhood. This is the norm, and mothers continue to live with their extended families – grandmother, mother, cousins, aunts, and uncles – as they raise their own children. Uncles stand in for the father when it comes to providing a male role model. And this means that any woman can have a child when she chooses, without the stigma of single motherhood – something that many Western women cannot say of themselves.

There have always been cultural norms around reproduction – norms involving what religion, caste, or race a partner should belong to; whether polygamy or monogamy is acceptable; which children are top of the pecking order to inherit property; whether or not an elderly man is an acceptable mate for a younger woman. But a recent survey carried out in more than seventy countries shows that our values about reproduction are tied not just to our family’s status and access to property, but also to the larger context of economic development. In industrialized societies, this encompasses a remaking of the idea of family that is completely changing the way we have babies – and what the future will look like.

At the most basic level is a change in our interactions with close family members, who are now often replaced with friends, colleagues, and peers in our social lives. This is especially true early in adulthood, when people enter the workforce and establish their own homes. At the same time, the level of education you’re expected to have in order to get a job has increased, which means that people are staying at school, at university, and in training, and building up debt, into the early years of adulthood. Men