The future of fertility?

Professor Carl Djerassi, a chemist who contributed to the development of the birth control pill, recently spoke to Britan's "The Telegraph" about his predictions for the future of sex, babies and their connection (or lack thereof).

According to Djerassi, by perhaps 2050, the majority of women will choose to freeze their eggs in their early twenties, thus "freeing" them to experience their careers without the worries of a baby interfering.  

Source

Next, these women will be sterilized, thereby "freeing" them to live life without the specter of an unexpected pregnancy haunting their limitless sexual encounters.

And, finally, when women are ready to check "motherhood" off of their to-do list, IVF will be performed (possibly with frozen sperm, but that needs to be experimented with and researched first).  Genetic screening will become standard.

Sex will officially be "just for fun."  No one will have to worry about having an "unwanted" child.  Daily Pill-popping and abortion will be no more.

Apparently, Pro. Djerassi is unfamiliar with the number of women who have aborted their children who were "wanted" and conceived by IVF after they changed their minds.

Surprisingly, he did not mention artificial wombs entering into the equation, thereby "freeing" women from the biological constraints and responsibilities of pregnancy.  Such an arrangement would also give men equal womb access, which would give the equality-as-sameness that the Pill seeks.

A brave new world indeed!  Where is the beauty of the mystery of fruitfulness, rooted in something (Someone) greater than ourselves?  Where is child-as-gift instead of child-as-commodity?  It's staggering to consider how detrimental this would be to society.  More than ever we would say, "We've forgotten who we are."

A gender-neutral menstruation app?

Say what? Apparently, a team of people has created an iPhone app to calculate one's menstrual cycle ... in a "gender-neutral" way. The creators say:

"We understand that sex and gender identity are not the same and we designed our app so it can be used by almost everyone. Mcalc is 100 percent gender neutral and it won't assume anything from your gender while using it... We all have different needs, and Mcalc can suit them accordingly."

Doesn't the fact that only half of the world's population could use a menstruation app already assume something about gender?  Do totally random people have periods, or do women have periods?  Last I heard, it was the latter.  

So, why do we need a "gender-neutral" menstruation app when gendered people who are specifically female are the only ones who menstruate?  Why do we feel a need to take out feminine pronouns or other words associated with women in order to track a woman's cycle?In an effort to promote equality are we hoping to find an artificial way to allow men to experience bleeding, cramping, mood swings, bloating and the like?  Is this app in some way meant to prepare men to experience a simulated menstrual cycle?  Or are we trying to hide the fact that men and women are different, that only women have the capacity to nurture life within their bodies, and that from the age of 12 or 14 their bodies are manifesting that fact?  Do we want to remove the pronouns so that we can pretend both men and women live and love in the exact same way?

You can't make this stuff up.  

The world is upside down

As always, Anthony Esolen has a way with words. His column, "Welcome to the Mental Ward" is an excellent depiction of the craziness of our nation and world right now.
A taste:

On the next Monday—for the lunacy outlasts the phases of the moon—we are told that a pregnant woman is, emotionally, a tender flower, who must be protected against people praying for her and her child as she enters the abortuary. On Tuesday, we are derided for being impossibly old-fashioned if we suggest that it might not be a good thing for women who are possibly pregnant to be crawling on their bellies on a battlefield, where men will be shouting things much more terrifying than the Hail Mary. On Wednesday we are told that a church’s failure to provide free contraceptives to its employees is a terrible sin against the common good. On Friday, we are told that the notion of the “common good” is trumped by the individual’s supposed right to be antisocial in matters of sex.

On Saturday, we are told that no man is an island. On Sunday, we are told that every woman is an island. On Monday, a bad man is sued to support a child conceived out of wedlock. On Tuesday, a good man is told to shut up when he sues to support his child conceived within wedlock, rather than have it aborted. On Wednesday, we complain that there are no good men to marry. On Thursday, we make sure to destroy the last institution that made for good men.

Read it all here.

"What Makes a Baby"

There's a new children's book out, whose title describes its topic, "What Makes a Baby." With cartoon-like illustrations aimed at an audience of 3-7 year olds, it might come as some surprise that a "certified sexuality educator" would have to write it. But this book isn't the usual, "Mom and Dad loved each other very much and their love grew into you!"

Rather, as one reviewer shared:

Indeed, the book doesn't even mention the word "mommy" or "daddy". Instead,What Makes a Baby explains that "Not all bodies have eggs in them. Some do, and some do not;" and that "Not all bodies have sperm in them. Some do, and some do not." Similarly, sex isn't so much tip-toed around as it is relegated to one unspecified option among many. "When grown ups want to make a baby they need to get an egg from one body and sperm from another body. They also need a place where a baby can grow."

The book is proudly lauded as appropriate for all "family styles," no matter how nontraditional. By removing gendered terms and family language, it attempts to communicate the origin of a child as some sort of raw scientific data that can occur inside a person or in a petri dish or in a doctor's office.

But is this really generosity to children?  To attempt to write books that water down the meaning of their existence as pure gift and mystery and love in order to find a way to excuse the technological and production-like vehicles invented to "make a baby"?  What does this say to the child?  What will our future world be like if all adults learned when they were five that to "make a baby" one simply needs an egg, a sperm and a place for the baby to grow?  

From the "You can't make this stuff up" file ...

We have two stories.

1) In California, legislation is being considered that would require insurance companies to cover the "infertility" of same-sex couples.  If they have not conceived after a year of sexual relations, they would qualify.  ...I'm pretty sure the year wouldn't be a necessary qualification in this case.

2) An Israeli company is experimenting with powdered eggs ... women's eggs.  After all, freezing eggs becomes a bit of a chore with the space and expense, so why not freeze dry them?  Add water and sperm to "make a baby."  

We really are living in the land of the spoiled child.  If I want something, even if it is naturally impossible, then someone somewhere somehow has to figure out how to give it to me.  Now.  

Using eggs from aborted babies to ... make a baby??

What happens when there is a worldwide "egg shortage" for artificial reproductive technologies? Well, we're already aware that there are aggressive campaigns to target the smartest, most beautiful, most talented women to extract their eggs for outlandish sums of money. Some are even aware of the women who have died in these procedures or the complicated health issues that some have faced after "donating" their eggs. (I thought donating was a term used for giving without an economic benefit in return.)

And now, the "egg shortage" has us looking somewhere else.
Aborted baby girls.
It's absolutely horrific, but as testing is underway, it unfortunately may be true. From the Daily Mail:

Scientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday.

They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers.

Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.

But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own.

Only last week a British clinic offered cut-price IVF treatment to women who agreed to donate eggs.

Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb.

Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks.

They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was 'theoretically possible' that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.

He claimed it would be ethically 'almost the same' as existing techniques.

Details of the major research programme were unveiled at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Madrid.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-186802/Should-eggs-aborted-babies.html#ixzz2PKWnb0MZ.
What in the world is going on today? How could we ever become so fixated on getting what we want that we would use babies that "aren't wanted" to create babies for those who "want" them? What kind of wanting is that? We can consider using the body of a baby who never got to see the world to become the raw genetic material for another baby?  We can find it "ethical" to use an unborn baby as a mother?

Please tell me how you would explain that to a child!  "Well, sweetheart, we wanted you so badly that we found a beautiful baby whose mother didn't want her, and we took her eggs so that her life mattered ... because now we have you!"

It's nauseating that we have doctors and researchers who would even consider such a thing and begin testing it!

Pandora's Box opened wider than ever in 1960 as the birth control pill was revealed to the world.  I think somewhere between then and now the lid of the box has been ripped off and thrown into the ocean.  The problems and ideas and "solutions" being purported today at alarming rates are far more horrific than Huxley, Orwell or any other prophet of the modern age could have been.