Will sex become purely recreational by 2050?

Don't count out old-fashioned reproduction just yet

Unmade bed
(Image credit: iStock)

Decades ago, it was hard to imagine public support for unconventional baby making. In vitro fertilization's first "test tube baby," Louise Brown, was born in 1978 to a world still enraptured by the futuristic genetic caste system put forth in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

But Brown is 36, and by now millions of families have experienced that same sense of joy as her parents had. The stigma of the practice — in which eggs are fertilized by sperm in a lab — certainly isn't gone, but it's lessening. A 2013 Pew survey showed only 12 percent of adults think IVF is morally wrong.

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Julie Kliegman

Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.