Children without sex is what the future holds, claims inventor of the

Children without sex is what the future holds, claims inventor of the Pill

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Let us take a journey through time to the year 2050.

Our time machine has landed in the spacious drawing room of Barbara,
the 45-year-old owner of a smart advertising agency, and Michael, her
equally high-flying husband, in their London townhouse.

Barbara’s career ambitions have been realised, and she is at the top of
her game, wealthy and happily married. The time is right to start a
family.

If she’d had a baby in her 20s or 30s, setting up her own agency --
what with all those 15-hour days -- would have been virtually
impossible. But now it’s not a problem. Barbara simply puts in a call
to the baby bank, where her eggs are kept in "cryopreservation".
Barbara deposited them there when she was 20, when they were in their
prime.

The eggs are transported to the lab, along with Michael’s sperm --
which he has taken the precaution of having frozen, too -- and an
embryo is produced and returned to her womb. Nine months later, their
"ice baby" is born.

Barbara is not alone. In the year 2050, thousands of middle-aged women
like her -- and some even older -- are putting motherhood on ice until
the time is absolutely right.

One might think this Huxleyesque vision of a Brave New World just a few
years from now sounds a little fantastical. Yet it is the prediction of
one of the world’s most eminent scientists, Carl Djerassi.

Professor Djerassi is the man who invented the Pill, the first oral
contraceptive, which triggered the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and
which many would argue changed the face of society and sexual morality
for ever -- and not necessarily for the better.

The Pill gave us sex without children. Now Djerassi has turned that
concept on its head. He believes the developed world is heading towards
its next cultural revolution -- children without sex.

"It is my own prediction that within the next 30 to 50 years in the
Western world, many women, when young, will bank their eggs or ovarian
tissue, have them frozen, and use them when they feel the time is right
for them to have a child," he says. "It will become commonplace.

"The world has changed. The days are past in which women in countries
like Britain have economic dependence on their husbands and take care
of the children.

"The days are past when women looked after children and nothing else.
Women have careers now. They are better educated, more affluent and
healthier on the whole, and many are now living into their 80s.

"They postpone having children until later and then they forget -- or
remember too late. Soon there will be nothing to stop a woman freezing
her eggs when they are at their healthiest and then using them later on
in life."

Less than a decade ago, such a scenario would have seemed impossible.
But even now, there are indications that Professor Djerassi’s
prediction will come true. A handful of babies have already been born
using frozen eggs.

A couple of years ago, freezing and thawing human eggs was a
highly-complicated procedure used only as a last resort -- for example,
when a woman has been made infertile through cancer treatment.

There was no guarantee of success because while sperm freezes well,
when an egg is frozen, its high water content means the ice crystals
that form inside can severely damage or destroy it.

Egg-freezing techniques are being increasingly refined. A new process
called vitrification, in which water is drawn out and anti-freeze
chemicals added, is improving success rates to the same level as normal
IVF treatment.

Widespread freezing of eggs, if Djerassi’s prediction is correct, is
bound to prove controversial. Is it ethical for women to have children
in their 60s? How will the child born using such a procedure be
affected both emotionally and physically? Even today we do not know
what the long-term consequences of IVF will be on those children it has
helped to create.

And then, of course, there is the question of women choosing to defrost
and fertilise eggs without bothering to find a partner to help raise
the child. Do we really want science to create a generation of ageing
mothers who’ve chosen to corrupt nature for the sake of their careers
by having children late in life -- with or without a man?

Djerassi is dogmatic in his rejection of these moral and social
concerns. Controversially, he believes advances in egg freezing
techniques would be greatly beneficial to the human race. "There are so
many unwanted children in the world," he says.

"This would be a way of helping to reduce the number of unwanted
children. Every child born to a woman who has taken a conscious
decision to have a child at that time would be wanted and loved and
properly cared for.

"Is there not something to be said for wisdom, affection and maturity?
Why shouldn’t a woman have a child when she is older if the science is
there to help her? Nowadays it is not thought peculiar if a man in his
50s or 60s has a child. So should it be different for a woman?"

Today, Djerassi is a sprightly 83. Until just last year he was still
skiing but has had to put any sporting adventures on hold after falling
and breaking his hip.

He lives with his wife, the author and poet Diane Middlebrook -- whom
he met in 1977 -- in a spacious apartment which covers two floors of a
grand townhouse in North London.

Djerassi, whose family fled Vienna for America after Hitler’s troops
marched into Austria, remains consumed by his work and locks himself
away for ten hours every day in his study.

These days he is a playwright and novelist, specialising in what he
terms "science in fiction". To date he has written five novels, seven
plays, two memoirs and a book of essays. He has just returned from New
York following the Broadway premiere of his play Phallacy.

Djerassi believes putting eggs on ice will have benefits to the health
of "babies born to older mothers".

Biologically, the ideal age to have a child would be 18-20, after which
the woman could go to university and have a career.

"In those circumstances, society would have to make arrangements for
childcare, which it is does not do, so women are waiting till their
careers are established and they can afford good childcare," he says.

"The problem with this is that the moment a woman hits 35 the risk of
her having a child with Down’s syndrome increases four to six times.

"At that age she has lost 90-95 percent of her eggs, and those that are
left are ageing rapidly. Storing her eggs is her insurance policy
against the future. I think you will get the odd woman of 60 or 70 who
will decide to have a baby, but most will be in their 30s and 40s."

But isn’t the idea of mass child production without sex somehow, well,
cold?

"Women, especially, romanticise the moment they conceived," he says,
"but the truth is many don’t actually know. And besides, is it such a
high price to pay for a healthy child born at a time that is right for
the mother?"

It is certainly a radical idea, but then Djerassi has always been a
radical. History was made in a small laboratory in Mexico City on
October 15, 1951, when he synthesised norethindrone, the first oral
contraceptive, recognised worldwide as one of the most significant
advances in steroid chemistry.

He was stunned by the impact it had on society: "I could not anticipate
the impact the Pill would have. No one really knew that women would
accept the Pill so readily."

The Pill gave women freedom from the fear of pregnancy and the horror
of backstreet abortion, but many see it as a cursed invention that is
almost single-handedly to blame for the sexual revolution which brought
about -- as its critics see it -- a wholesale collapse of moral values
across the Western world.

Djerassi does not concur with this damning verdict on the legacy of his
invention. He argues that society was changing anyway; the Pill just
smoothed the way.

"The sexual revolution of the Sixties coincided with the introduction
of the Pill -- the Pill did not bring it about," he says bluntly. "The
Pill came along at the right time, in the same period as hippy culture,
the drug culture and rock ’n’ roll culture.

"That the Pill facilitated that direction is absolutely true, but I
believe it would have happened anyway. Not as explosively, but more
gradually. It would have happened in exactly the same way."

And he says it is a myth that everyone started having a lot more sex
with multiple partners -- that his invention effectively allowed the
risk-free one-night stand to flourish as it never could before.

"Women were having sex before the Pill, but they were getting pregnant
and having abortions. The Pill helped to stop that," he says.

What about the side effects of the Pill? "There is nothing without side
effects," says Djerassi. "Does it increase the risk of breast cancer?
Well, there have been thousands of studies and the question is still
debated. But we must not forget that it has been proven that the Pill
reduces the risk of ovarian cancer by 50 per cent -- that is crystal
clear."

He has been unable to escape his "father of the Pill" tag, though he
prefers to think of himself as the "mother of the Pill". "In order to
give birth to anything, you need three people," he says. "A father, a
mother and a midwife."

Djerassi was the chemist who provided the raw chemical ingredients --
the "egg". The biologist Gregory Pincus, who co-ordinated its
experimentation as a contraceptive, might be seen as the "father". And
the physician John Rock, who oversaw the first clinical trials, was the
"midwife".

Djerassi’s invention made him a very wealthy man. Unlike many, he had
enough belief in what he was doing to buy shares in Syntex, the small
Mexican company where he did his research.

"They were shares I bought on the open market," he says. "Other people
could have bought them but no one believed in the future of the
company, which developed very much because of work that I and other
colleagues conducted. We deserved it."

With his fortune he bought a 1,200-acre ranch near San Francisco and
indulged his passion for art, becoming a leading collector of the works
of the painter Paul Klee. He also became a professor of chemistry at
Stanford University -- which he is to this day.

With his second wife, Norma Lundholm, Djerassi has a son, Dale, a
documentary filmmaker. He and Norma also had a daughter, Pamela. It was
her suicide at the age of 28 that has been the great tragedy of his
life. It came a year after he met his third wife, Diane.

After Pamela’s death, her father set up an artists’ colony on the
ranch. He sold his Picassos, Giacomettis and Henry Moores in order to
fund the colony, which continues today. Djerassi’s London flat is
filled with artwork produced by artists who’ve lived there.

He also bequeathed his entire Klee collection to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. "Well, you can’t take it with you," he says.

But it is not his art collection for which Djerassi will be remembered:
the Pill will be his true legacy. Given that he has already
fundamentally altered the relationship between sex and procreation,
perhaps we should take seriously his alarming predictions for the
future.

Sex without children; children without sex. A Brave New World indeed.

Monday 16 July 2007 - 09:06:00

Poll

Sensual Meditation

Date published: not known

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