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

tug of belonging, biologically, to another family, rather than the one into which he or she has been born? Are the children of a donor’s eggs, or sperm, siblings in any sense? One British fertility doctor based in Oxford told me, for instance, that he thought the probability of two half-siblings meeting and marrying in the future was so slim that it was never something that worried him in his work. But this is the sort of taboo that still carries weight in society, just as the chances of it happening goes up with the number of IVF pregnancies. Dr Pacey of Sheffield University told me that he had been inundated with phone calls from infertile couples following a December 2010 press report in which it was claimed that the team at the North East England Stem Cell Institute had succeeded in creating a functioning artificial sperm. There is no doubt that the ability to make sperm and eggs in the lab has an allure for infertile individuals, for the very fact that it would sweep away the ambiguity inherent in the donor system – every bit of genetic identity will be their own.

If the option were to exist one day, the ultimate solo parent will probably be a woman who needs nothing but her own stem cells and an artificial Y chromosome to produce eggs and sperm. She might use two of her own eggs to create a child, converting one egg into a pseudo-sperm to fertilize herself, as scientists have already done in mice. And then, should an artificial womb become a reality, she might even forego pregnancy, allowing a doctor to set the ideal conditions for the foetus’s development. She could even keep working, as men do, until the moment the baby is born.

This would be the great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex. The question is not if it will happen, but when.

EPILOGUE

NEXT GENERATION

Over the past century, every innovation in reproductive technology, from the use of anaesthesia during childbirth to the first successful ovary transplant, has been met with criticism and resistance. Most have been seen as a threat to the traditional family – a change in the roles of men and women. But science is always conceiving the inconceivable – looking for the next frontier to cross.

In the 1950s, for instance, some scientists investigated the possibility of an all-female farm – a farm populated by only cows, sows, and ewes, with no bulls, boars, or rams. Animal breeding, as it has been conducted for millennia, requires raising and feeding big males for the sake of a little sperm. So why not create a line of virgin-born livestock that would improve farmers’ profits and, as a bonus, yield new insights into genetics and sex itself? The assumption, and indeed the aim, of the work was that males are mostly expendable.

But this is not nearly the full story of reproduction. Going solo is not an option available to women alone. In fact, in a strange Aristotelian twist, the newest reproductive technologies – artificial wombs and artificial eggs – seem poised to give men more potential than women to make a baby without the opposite sex. And as shown in the studies of solo parents, the logistical route to parenthood – the how of having a child – is far less influential in a child’s life than is the choice of parenthood – the why. Perhaps the necessity of our lifestyle and the ingenuity of medical science will force us to accept families that have been marginalized previously. They may even spur the emergence of families such as have never before existed, as genetics and biology are ripped out of the egg and sperm and allowed to be combined freely. One such case: two baby girls, called ‘twiblings’ by their mother, who were born in New York City in 2010. After she had gone through four failed rounds of IVF, the mother ended up using a donor’s eggs, her husband’s sperm, and two surrogate mothers (pregnant at the same time) to have her daughters, who are ‘twins’ only in the sense that they were born around the same time. Both surrogate mothers continued to be involved after the babies’ births.

What were once invisible, indivisible seeds of life will act as portals rather than as ingredients to be brought together to create a child. The constituent, beautiful machinery of which eggs are built will very soon broker successful pregnancies and healthier babies – with three genetic parents. This fast advancing area of research involves transferring the male and female parents’ DNA into a donor egg, which already contains a package of DNA from the donor, in a tiny organ in the egg called a mitochondrion. The child born from this process would inherit a fraction of his or her genetic code from the egg donor, breaking the rules of reproduction as we know them today.

There already are children born from permutations of biological, gestational, and genetic input from more than two adults, and this will increasingly be humanity’s future. Whether or not medical intervention soon gives women and men the choice of having biological children with a person of their same sex or completely on their own – unrestricted by the physical limits of the human body as well as the socio-economic limits on the human soul – the reproduction of the future is set to rewrite much of the fabric of human society. Male plus female equals baby will no longer be our only path forward. As we conceive the once inconceivable and take full control of how and when we bring the next generation into the world, we are sure to dislodge many notions of sex and gender along the way.