Sex Will Soon Be Purely Recreational

One of the co-inventors of the birth control pill is impregnating the Internet with a new theory: that his own invention will be pretty much obsolete by the year 2050 and that sex will be reserved for recreational, rather than procreational, purposes. In an interview with the Telegraph, Austrian-American chemist Carl Djerassi says that as fertility treatments improve, more people will take advantage of them and save in-bedroom antics for fun only. Predictions from his interview:

• Advances in IVF will mean that even people who aren't having fertility problems will give it a whirl, with potential future parents becoming part of a new "mañana generation" that puts off reproduction until they're good and ready.

• Delaying parenthood this way may result in healthier babies overall, since people will ostensibly freeze their eggs and sperm at a younger age and then get sterilized.

• "Women in their twenties 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 inexorabl[e] ticking of the biological clock," Djerassi says. But what will eventually lure them to IVF pregnancies: more accurate genetic screening.

• Although Djerassi doesn't believe a male contraceptive pill is forthcoming (it would take too many years to study the effects on sperm, he says), he thinks our armed forces would be perfect guinea pigs for testing how long frozen sperm can last. "With little difficulty and relatively minor expenditure, tens of thousands of volunteers could collect their own semen to be cryopreserved for many years," he says.

• Fighting over abortion will be a distant memory: Unwanted pregnancies just won't happen anymore.

Click for his full piece. (More the pill stories.)