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This is a book I found while browsing in Powell's, and made a note of for later. Happily, the public library here had it, and I just finished it. The subtitle The Reproductive Revolution and how it will change us is pretty descriptive. It's a book published in 2000, describing various reproductive technologies and how their use might change society. This independent article has a useful short timeline of such technologies; I hadn't really appreciated that the first "test tube" (IVF) baby was in 1978. Surrogacy comes a bit later. Embryo screening in 1988; sperm manipulations I'd barely heard of before in the 1990s; first frozen-egg baby in 1997, who'd be turning 13 this year. The whole thing is science-fiction fast, and overlooked by most actual SF, important exceptions being the Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold and Crest of the Stars by Hiroyuki Morioka.
There's a bibliography, mostly books with a few article, but there's no direct references for claims in the text, which is annoying when he starts making claims about homo- and bi-sexuality I've never heard of. No index, either. That aside, the book mostly talks about technologies that already exist and are in commercial use, with some reasonable extensions; the speculation, delivered first through fictional vignettes and then in direct expounding, is on how the social effects of those technologies. Something radical like artificial wombs -- Bujold's uterine replicators, Morioka's gestation machines, Transhuman Space's exowombs -- are barely mentioned, if at all.
The technologies he does talk about: paternity testing, child support laws (not a medical tech, but relevant), fertility testing, artificial insemination, surrogacy, IVF, increasing IVF capability (working with increasingly immature sperm, with an ultimately limit of making our own sperm or haploid cells from somatic cells), cloning, gene screening and therapy. The executive summary of what he sees happening is a trend toward single-parent families, possibly blended -- meaning there's a single commissioning parent responsible for a child's existence, 'blended' meaning two such parents might live together for a while. Other half of the child's genes (if not cloned) could come from any other human being in existence, with sex and relatedness not being barriers. Most (middle-class) people would bank their gametes in young adulthood and get sterilized, separating sex from reproduction, and reproduction from gamete aging. Finances... the main parent might pay some distant successful person for access to their genes, waiving child support rights, while others might have a more involved gene donor who shares in child support and child-raising.
It's very much like Morioka's Abh, except that Baker has to assume use of oocyte donors and surrogate mothers by single men or gay couples, whereas the Abh can use machines.
( More detail )
So there's a possible future: one where everyone is potentially fertile with everyone else, but exactly only when they want to be; where some people try to be traditional couples, but there's far greater scope for unusual families and non-pair-bonding behavior; where successful women can have as many children as men, and both sexes converge on reproductively optimal behaviors; where evolution by selection can speed up greatly.
There's a bibliography, mostly books with a few article, but there's no direct references for claims in the text, which is annoying when he starts making claims about homo- and bi-sexuality I've never heard of. No index, either. That aside, the book mostly talks about technologies that already exist and are in commercial use, with some reasonable extensions; the speculation, delivered first through fictional vignettes and then in direct expounding, is on how the social effects of those technologies. Something radical like artificial wombs -- Bujold's uterine replicators, Morioka's gestation machines, Transhuman Space's exowombs -- are barely mentioned, if at all.
The technologies he does talk about: paternity testing, child support laws (not a medical tech, but relevant), fertility testing, artificial insemination, surrogacy, IVF, increasing IVF capability (working with increasingly immature sperm, with an ultimately limit of making our own sperm or haploid cells from somatic cells), cloning, gene screening and therapy. The executive summary of what he sees happening is a trend toward single-parent families, possibly blended -- meaning there's a single commissioning parent responsible for a child's existence, 'blended' meaning two such parents might live together for a while. Other half of the child's genes (if not cloned) could come from any other human being in existence, with sex and relatedness not being barriers. Most (middle-class) people would bank their gametes in young adulthood and get sterilized, separating sex from reproduction, and reproduction from gamete aging. Finances... the main parent might pay some distant successful person for access to their genes, waiving child support rights, while others might have a more involved gene donor who shares in child support and child-raising.
It's very much like Morioka's Abh, except that Baker has to assume use of oocyte donors and surrogate mothers by single men or gay couples, whereas the Abh can use machines.
( More detail )
So there's a possible future: one where everyone is potentially fertile with everyone else, but exactly only when they want to be; where some people try to be traditional couples, but there's far greater scope for unusual families and non-pair-bonding behavior; where successful women can have as many children as men, and both sexes converge on reproductively optimal behaviors; where evolution by selection can speed up greatly.