One of the developers of the contraceptive pill has predicted his own invention will become redundant as more people choose to be sterilised, making sex purely recreational by 2050.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Professor Carl Djerassi said increasing numbers of babies being born through IVF in the West will lead to men and women choosing to have their eggs and sperm frozen at a young age.
Prof Djerassi, 91, told the paper that people would then be sterilised out of convenience because there would be no need to have sex to produce children.
“Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilisations will occur among fertile women than the current five million fertility-impaired ones,” he said.
“For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 per cent.”
The scientist, who is an author and an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University in the US, predicted that women in their twenties will increasingly opt for IVF to delay pregnancy without the worry of “the biological clock”.
