When Making Babies Goes High Tech: A Future Tense Event Recap

In vitro fertilization was originally intended to help a very specific young, married, and female demographic to conceive. But a lot has changed since Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in 1978. The explosion of single mothers and same-sex parents using the procedure has attracted a lot of attention, but society also needs to grapple with the questions of control, regulation, and access that other emerging reproductive technologies could raise.  From pre-implantation genetic screening to exo-wombs, these changes could even evolve our most basic notions of family and society.

A first step may be agreeing to talk about this possible future at all. The highly personal nature of reproductive science and technology makes it a difficult topic to discuss and legislate, according to speakers at a Future Tense event on the future of reproduction in Washington, D.C., last week. After all, we’re not talking about hip replacement surgery; this is our future children and grandchildren. As Dieter Egli, a senior research fellow at the New York Stem Cell Foundation, put it: “When we touch the...