Sex in 2050 will just be for fun, says father of Pill

10 November 2014 - 02:05 By ©The Sunday Telegraph
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Sex could become purely recreational by 2050, with large numbers of babies in the Western world born through in vitro fertilisation, claims the professor who invented the contraceptive pill.

Professor Carl Djerassi, an Austrian-American chemist, said he believed that the Pill would become obsolete because men and women would choose to freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised.

He also claims it would end abortions, as no children would be unplanned or unwanted.

Djerassi said that advances in fertility treatment made it much safer for prospective parents who do not have fertility problems to consider IVF.

The progress will give rise to a "mañana generation" who are safe in the knowledge that parenthood can be delayed without repercussions, he claims, using the Spanish for "tomorrow"

"The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy," he said.

"Women in their 20s 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 inexorable 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.

"Over the next few decades, say by 2050, more IVF fertilisations will occur among fertile women than the current 5million fertility-impaired ones. For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100%."

Djerassi, 91, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, played a crucial role in the development of the oral contraceptive pill in 1951.

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