According to Hank Greely, the director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and Biosciences, human reproduction may become automated faster than you realize.
Greely believes that within three decades, people will no longer have sex as a way to reproduce, and instead rely on genetically edited embryos grown from skin-derived stem cells, not the combination of an egg or sperm, The Independent reported.

According to Greely, this process ensures that the embryo is free from any devastating genetic diseases, and would also be cheaper in the long run because of the money it would save in healthcare over the years. What’s more, Greely predicts that couples would be able to choose other genetic traits in their children, such as physical features and intelligence.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to say this embryo will get a 1550 on its two-part SAT,” Greely said this week at Aspen Ideas Festival, Quartz reported, “But, this embryo has a 60% chance of being in the top half, this embryo has a 13% chance of being in the top 10%—I think that’s really possible.”

This may sound far-fetched, but the gap between sex and procreation has been widening for the past 50 years thanks to the rise of fertility drugs, embroynic genetic testing, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Over the last ten years in the UK, egg freezing has increased tenfold, from just under 230 cycles in 2009 to almost 2,400 cycles in 2019. IVF birth rates in 2019 were three times higher than in 1991, and the use of egg and sperm donors has risen, too. “Now, maybe three or four per cent of the babies born in the developed world are conceived in some manner other than sexual intercourse, and I think in the future that percentage will go up,” Greely adds.

When scientists figure out how to make this work for humans, infertile and queer couples could have biological babies without needing to go through costly and risky procedures like IVF, donors or surrogates. Single people, meanwhile, could produce ‘uni babies’, using both eggs and sperm grown from their cells.

The idea may sound far-out, but according to Quartz, it already happens on a much smaller and limited scale as a way to prevent certain diseases. Although extremely expensive at the moment, advances in stem cell technology will help to drive down the cost. In addition, the amount that the government would save on not having to take care of sick babies would also make this more cost-efficient.
As many of you may worry, this is not the end of sex because recreational sex will always be with us, but it’s the end of sex as a way of procreating.
It will not be the complete end. People will still get pregnant the old-fashioned way, maybe for religious reasons, for philosophical reasons, for romantic reasons or maybe because they are teenagers and the back seat of the car is there.

“Eugenics is a slippery word; it means many things to different people. To some, it’s state-enforced reproductive control. To some, what we had was state-enforced sterilization. To some, it’s any kind of reproductive choice, but those are different things. For me, I think coercion is much more important than the issues of selection. The concern about the state or the insurance company or someone else, forcing you to pick particular babies, worries me a lot more than having parents make choices, though that raises its own set of questions.” Greely said.

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