1:12 AM
kotesh
The birth of Louise, whose twentieth birthday was celebrated in Britain with great fanfare, excited fears and controversy similar to those surrounding cloning (see Genetic Engineering). As with cloning, the fear was that the technology of in vitro fertilization would lead to the depersonalized manufacturing of human beings associated with some nightmarish future society, but this has not come to pass for several reasons. One is that in vitro fertilization is successful only about 15% of the time. Another, much more significant reason is that there are few women capable of producing a child through internal fertilization who would want to conceive without the intimacy of sexual intercourse.
There are exceptions, of course, in real life (two women in a same-sex relationship who want a child, for example) as well as in fiction. In the latter category, the character of Jenny Fields in the American novelist John Irving's World According to Garp—published, ironically, in the same year as the birth of Louise Brown—would undoubtedly have conceived a child by in vitro means if those means had been available to her. As it was, Jenny, who conceived the book's title character during World War II, manages to do so by having intercourse purely for the purpose of producing offspring. She does this by choosing a wounded, brain-damaged airman who will never remember having had sex with her and who dies shortly thereafter.
