Parthenogenisis

53 thoughts on Parthenogenisis

1. Given previous experience with such thought experiments, am I to assume that you’re only considering this drug to work on cis women?

2. Interesting story

   I could see the ‘Women stay at home’ 50’s to be the most impactful point regarding society’s changes to function. This would be an interesting dystopian story.

   3) if it took off, it could become the dominant form of procreation, enough so that with the side effect men could became a minority (not the close to 50 technical minority we are now, but a less than 10 percent rarely around minority). I would guess that a noticeable drop in the male population would take at least 20 to 30 years after the drug became commonly accepted. It would probably take another 100 to 150 years for the population to approach its new equilibrium.

   This is all of course assuming that the male birth control we have been hearing about from india gets approved around the same time.

   One note, If the drug is truly asexual (ie no genetic difference between parent and offspring) it would not work at all. The above assumptions were made assuming some method of autogamy.

3. Question: Would the choice be either/or … that is, would a person contemplating taking the drug have to choose whether s/he would a) not take the drug and continue to reproduce sexually, or b) take the drug and cease being able to produce sexually, but instead be able to produce asexually, or c) continue to “at will” reproduce sexually or asexually as s/he desired?

   I’d also be interested to consider (as back story to the fictional universe) why the drug was created (usually there has to be a compelling financial/research reason OR it was an accidental by-product of something) and how it would be marketed. What demographic of people with uteri would the drug be pushed toward?

4. 1) Probably quite a few – perhaps not as many as some would expect? I could see a surge in revolutionary/separatist movements (thinking kind of the Amazons in Y: The Last Man) and especially in places like Africa, South Asia, etc. where the plight of women is particularly dire.

   2) and 3) related – the biggest problem would be a collapse in genetic diversity – I think that as a long term(centuries) medical/social approach the drug would have to introduce limited mutations or allow for genetic recombination. Cloning down the centuries results in a non-diverse population that can’t adapt to pandemics, just as conventional antibiotics and other medicines weaken in efficacy because of overuse.

   I think the result would in fact be a massive pandemic (perhaps in 300-400 years) that would devastate the non-adapting population. You’d end with a post-apocalyptic world where parthenogenetics are pitted against conventional reproducers…

5. @Gabrielle Physiologically speaking, it wouldn’t have to only work on cis women, but could work on anyone (cis or trans) who had the internal organs (uterus) to gestate. In order to create a world in which the drug would work on cis men and/or people without viable wombs then you’d have to do the extra work of establishing how gestation in those cases happens. Not impossible … but, as you say, not generally how these science fiction/future-babymaking stories work.

6. 3) if it took off, it could become the dominant form of procreation, enough so that with the side effect men could became a minority (not the close to 50 technical minority we are now, but a less than 10 percent rarely around minority). I would guess that a noticeable drop in the male population would take at least 20 to 30 years after the drug became commonly accepted. It would probably take another 100 to 150 years for the population to approach its new equilibrium.

   If you mean procreation via male/female parenting, yes. If you mean the actual existence of males, then no, the odds are the mix may shift slightly due to decision effects (do I want to keep a boy/girl?), but it will stay around 50/50, unless the drug also favors female progeny. The woman bearing the child will still have a 50/50 chance of having a male, thus maintaining a rough balance.

7. 1) Do you think any/many/all women would take this drug today?

   I think women who want to have children without sex with a man would take this. It would replace in vitro fertilization perhaps. I think that some women would still want to have children with a partner, but I think there would be more single mothers if this were easier and cheaper to access and use than in vitro.

   2) If not/so then why? How could the drug be improved? (i.e. would it take super-powers as a side-effect for the entirety of woman-kind to take it as apposed to there being no other side-effects?) Also, when would be/have been the ideal time for the developers to release this drug? (50s; 70s; asap; the future; never)

   I explained why in my answer to #1.

   I’m not sure what you mean by taking super-powers as a side affect. Do you mean would it result in super-powers as a side-affect?

   I think now or moving into the future would be a good time to make the drug available. I don’t think before now that our society as a whole would have accepted women being so independent with their decisions to be single mothers and to make it so easy.

   3) a) How do you suppose such a drug would effect society? (domestically and/or globally)

   I think that society would be divided by yet another thing that makes people different. Women are already marginalized because of their gender. Same for transgender, gay, queer, black, etc. people. If there were women in our society who didn’t require men to have children and could do it so easily, there would be outcries against them as being against god and unnatural and the list could go on.

   b) If one side-effect caused all children born subsequently to be female and parthenogenic how do you suppose this would effect society after 20, 50 or 100 years? (This part is crucial so please don’t hold back on you response here)

   I think that society would see an imbalance of women over men. The equality of women might improve if there were more women in the world and if they could only produce female children who in turn are naturally parthenogenic. Then again, the parthenogenic women might in turn form a sort of unbalanced society where only parthenogenic women are acceptable in the world and all others are deemed lesser. I suppose that would depend on the personalities of the women who take this drug and are leaders or are put into positions of power, as well as how quickly and often they would choose to have another child.

   4) On a personal note: What would convince you to take it if you would not initially? (imagine a spectrum: at one end the drug only has the initial parthenogenic effect; at the other you would become a parthenogenic deity/animal/man)

   I suppose if the drug turned me into a diety I’d be willing to take such a thing. As I don’t want anymore children I’d have no other reason to take it.

8. Re: the lack of genetic diversity, it’s possible this new parthenogenetic society could adapt by intentionally exposing the to-be-cloned gametes to radiation or some other mutative agent to simulate the random mutations that arise due to sexual reproduction.

   I think population statistics would become hugely important and weird if people could essentially create human beings on command for the length of their entire mature lives.

   It would be interesting to see whether “gender” roles arose in an increasingly biologically female society. Also, whether the increasing rarity of men would make them a curiosity or a commodity or both. People like rare things, whether they’re useful or not.

   Also, affect =/= effect.

9. @Puggins

   I was making the comments under the assumption that the side effect, mentioned above in 3b) was in effect. I thought the side effect could make the story a little more interesting, and the discussion a little more provocative.

   One additional comment, the abortion rate for the drug induced pregnancies would be lower than for the traditional group since the majority of abortions from drug induced pregnancies would be for medical reasons.

10. Warning: armchair population genetics.

    The daughters born through parthenogenesis would be clones of their mothers – they’d be like identical twins raised a generation apart. The mother-daughter relationship would inevitably be different for a clone (as compared to a daughter who shares only half your genes).

    Regarding (1), I think it would really depend on how many women wanted that clone parent relationship. I know my mother had a hell of a time raising and socialising me, and I don’t think I’d want to raise a kid with the same temperament I had in my early years!

    Regarding (3a), there would not necessarily be a collapse in genetic diversity. There are already several species (e.g. aphids) which have both sexual and asexual reproduction; the fact that they sometimes use sexual reproduction is enough to maintain genetic diversity.

    Regarding (3b), the population could reach an equilibrium proportion of people reproducing sexually and others reproducing asexually. Yes, when a woman joined the asexual population, all her descendants would be part of that population too, so you’d expect the proportion of asexuals to increase monotonically, if everyone has the same fitness. However, the subpopulation that continued to reproduce sexually would be more resistant to new diseases than the subpopulation of asexual people, so they’re likely to have higher fitness on average.

    For a zoological comparison it’d be interesting to look at populations of insects infected with Wolbachia (a parasite that turns insects, and all their daughters, parthenogenic). This isn’t a perfect analogy, though, because Wolbachia itself confers some fitness advantages (resistance to infections, etc.), and it can also infect new hosts horizontally (unlike this hypothetical drug, which I assume is not catching!).

    Remember that the human population is massive (almost seven billion, sheesh) so we’re not all going to turn asexual any time soon. Also, most of the world won’t be able to afford the drug. 🙁

11. @ Puggins: “The woman bearing the child will still have a 50/50 chance of having a male”

    No, not unless she’s getting the Y chromosome from somewhere else! (In which case this “drug” is more like sperm donation, I guess?) Parthenogenesis means you procreate without anyone else’s genes, which means you only have your own genes to draw on, which means you give birth to a clone of yourself. Thus, assuming this only works on cis women (which seems likely, until we develop the tissue technology to grow artificial ovaries for people who carry a Y chromosome), all the progeny will be daughters.

12. It’s been done (not a drug, it was genetic engineering) in David Brin’s Glory Season. But that was speculating on a society long, long after the parthenogenetic ability was wired in; thinking about how it would affect *our* society is fascinating.

    No one would take it if it locked their daughters into *having* to reproduce parthenogenetically, but if it’s an option, where you can choose parthenogenesis or you can have sex with a man and choose sexual reproduction… oh, yeah. It would sell like hotcakes. In the developed world, where women have enough power to control their own reproduction and not be murdered for pregnancy out of wedlock. In the places where women have no power, pressure to produce male offspring would make it unlikely that many would take the drug. So over the generations, you’d have a conflict between majority-female developed-world nations with full female equality (and they’d have full female equality because the fact that women had enough power to parth in the first place would mean that within two generations, there would be significantly more women than men in the society, and a large contingent of those women would feel strongly that they don’t really *need* men, so there goes patriarchy) and majority-male (because of sex-selective abortions, poor health care for mothers, etc.) nations living under patriarchy, where they would see the existence of parthing women in the developed world as an existential threat (and it kind of would be, if you’re a patriarchal male.)

    You’d also have conflicts within a given society between parthing women and non-parthing (even if the exact same woman is capable of doing either one.) Parthing women would have a lot of sameness to them after a few generations, because all the mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins are genetically identical, and you’d get people with really, really good familial knowledge of what works for their bloodline and what doesn’t (“oh, all us Saradotter parths are kind of airheaded, so we really need good PDAs and software packages to help us keep track of our schedules”; “hey, I’m a Lisadotter, if you see me at 7 am it’s because I haven’t been to bed yet”), but weaknesses that affect one would affect them all. (I’m not talking about illnesses, though obviously that would be the case; I’m talking about things like “Marydotter parths are all really creative, but good luck getting them to follow through”, or “the real problem with being a Latishadotter is that we really need someone to impose structure on us when we’re kids because we can’t generate it ourselves… but we’re all raised by Latishadotters who can’t generate structure.”) So there would be a stereotype that parths are, basically, kind of all the same person within a single bloodline, and non-parths are more variable. Some professions would prefer parths of a particular bloodline; others would discriminate against parths. Women who don’t parth might be morally opposed to it or think it’s genetic suicide or just love their Nigel too much, and if you think the mommy wars are bad, wait until you see the conflicts between parths and non-parths.

    Men would for the most part be threatened by parths, although lots of them would be in relationships with parths where it’s understood that if you’re having sex with Amy Jennadotter, you’re her romantic special friend and you get to be Uncle Bob to Mindy Jennadotter and Keisha Jennadotter, but you will never have a child with her and you have no legal parental rights or responsibilities toward her parth-kids… and if you’re ok with that, then great, because parths are only slightly less likely to be hetero than the general population, and that only because lesbians would disproportionately choose parthing. So men who choose not to parent or men who want the experience of parenting but don’t want to pass on their own genes could be happy with a parth, but men who want kids of their own or who really want to parent a boy would prefer to avoid long-term relationships with parths. The existence of a disparity in the numbers of men and women, and the fact that some men choose parths, would probably lead to reluctant acceptance of de facto polygyny in a lot of places, where non-parths accept that their Nigel probably has two or more girlfriends, and that’s what they have to deal with because there literally are not enough men.

    Organized religion would be seen as universally opposed to it. “Liberal” religions that don’t shove their beliefs down people’s throats would be accepting, but not out front shouting about it, or else be mildly uncomfortable with it, so the attitude would develop that parthing is anti-religion and that “people of faith” are opposed to it. On the other hand, alternative feminist religions might finally gain some traction. There would be schools where parths get beaten up by the other girls, or attacked by the boys, and no one cares; there would be other schools where boys would be subjected to active discrimination and non-parth girls would be shut out of social networks, and the teachers don’t do anything about it.

    Parth lines would invariably have started with women who had sufficient access to medication, education, and feminist leanings that they knew about the drug and thought having a baby without a man was a good idea, so parths would be, in comparison to the general population, more educated and more likely to be middle or upper class. So while there would be enormous discrimination against parths in some areas, the parths would be much more likely to be digitally connected to each other, have resources, and be politically aware… so when an incident of anti-parth discrimination occurred, parths would throw a lot of resources into fighting it and defending the victims.

    Parths *might* be more likely to commit violence against those that harm their line than the average woman. Because they’d generally have been started by women who were comfortable with the idea of daughters who were a lot like themselves, and who were comfortable with not having men involved, they would be much more likely than the average woman to unite behind other women in general and line-sisters in particular (founder effect, not due to any factor of being parth specifically but due to who chose to parth in the first place), so you *may* have parths handing out vigilante justice to people who have raped or assaulted a fellow parth or a line-sister. Or, parths may be hyper-vigilant against accusations of such things because they fear society turning against them.

    Within the parthing community, there might be discrimination or loss of social status involved with choosing to have a father for their child. Families of mixed parthing status, where there’s a father and some of the kids are his with the mother and some of them are parths of the mother, might have internal conflicts and might face prejudice from both non-parth and parth communities.

    Racial conflicts and ethnic conflicts might be exacerbated; some racial or ethnic groups might be much less likely to parth, others more so. The divide between middle-class educated black women and lower-class black women without access to medical care, let alone parthing drugs, might be heightened because the general sense in the community of black women that you’re gonna have to raise your kid alone anyway because there’s a shortage of good black men might lead women who *can* parth to do so, and then use the resources of having a sisterhood behind them to make gains that the women who can’t parth can’t, leading to possibly a lot of resentment and anger between the two groups.

    Then there’s ableism. There might be a lot of prejudice *from* parths against women who parth knowing that they have a serious genetic disorder, and a lot of ableism that manifests as stereotypes against an entire sister-line. “Rachel Jones should never have parthed because she’s deaf. Now the entire Racheldotter line is deaf and it’s just tragic. There ought to be a law.” Blah blah blah.

    So there are a lot of things to think about. I don’t know if the person planning to write this wants to talk about what happens right after the drug is introduced, where most of this stuff wouldn’t have happened yet, but personally I find the thought of where we’d be in two or three generations after it started to be fascinating. I also think that, despite all the issues I’ve outlined, it would be overall better for women once the dust settled. I don’t think there would a significant impact to human genetic diversity because there would be too many women who want to reproduce with men.

    (As for me: 100% totally if it weren’t for the fact that I already have 4 kids and probably can’t biologically afford to have another… and I might make an exception. I am totally arrogant enough to want to have a line of Alaradotters come after me. :-))

13. Thus, assuming this only works on cis women (which seems likely, until we develop the tissue technology to grow artificial ovaries for people who carry a Y chromosome), all the progeny will be daughters.

    Oh, I just wanted to mention that the drug would always work on trans men, if they have not had their ovaries and uterus removed and if they are willing to undergo pregnancy. However, we don’t know the genetics of trans-ness, except that identical twins are not 100% concordant. So the children of a trans man would most likely still be daughters, and some of the genetically female children of cis women would be sons. They’d all be XX, however.

14. Technically, the child wouldn’t have to be an exact clone of the mother. You could get some gene rearrangement by instead fusing two of the woman’s eggs to create a zygote (rather than having a single stem cell from the woman grow into the baby). But a mechanism like that would have the same risks as incest. The cloning model would probably be more sustainable over the long run, supplemented with sexual reproduction when necessary.

    On initial roll-out, I would predict that such a pill would end up in a similar position to any other fertility treatment. Something that is used only when absolutely necessary and that carries some amount of societal stigma (probably similar to that leveled against single women who use sperm donors to get pregnant, with the added incest and/or cloning angle). It would be a boon for couples that have male-factor fertility issues, single women who want children, or lesbian couples, but I think it would take some pretty dramatic social changes for there to be many takers outside those groups (one could even imagine some sort of backlash against such technology).

15. So I realize that this is a hypothetical, but you couldn’t come up with something more realistic? This is ludicrous even by science fiction standards. The only things in nature that produce asexually are single-cell organisms some fungus and plants. That is it, no insects, no birds, and especially no mammals. There is absolutely no way for a “drug” to cause this to work. More interesting and plausible would have been a hypothetical about genetic patterning, in vitro-fertilization, even a disease that just affects men/women.

    For an interesting exploration of how changing birthing technologies might affect society read Lois McMasters Bujold

16. @ Kierra: “Technically, the child wouldn’t have to be an exact clone of the mother. You could get some gene rearrangement by instead fusing two of the woman’s eggs to create a zygote (rather than having a single stem cell from the woman grow into the baby). But a mechanism like that would have the same risks as incest. The cloning model would probably be more sustainable over the long run, supplemented with sexual reproduction when necessary.”

    Oh, good point. But it’s hard to overstate those risks. This would be really extreme inbreeding – an inbreeding coefficient of 50%! For comparison, children of parent-child and brother-sister unions have an inbreeding coefficient of 25% (and, according to wikipedia, “Studies suggest that 20-36% of these children will die or have major disability due to the inbreeding.”). I think fusing eggs from the same parent would be unsustainable even in the short term, and unethical.

    Looking up, I now notice that Puggins was replying to Icarus, who assumed “some method of autogamy.” Human genetic architecture just isn’t set up for that. Kierra described one version of autogamy that would lead to extreme inbreeding extremely quickly. Anything feasible would require massive genetic modification, such that we’d essentially become a different species. Besides, I thought what made this hypothetical question interesting was exactly the cloning issue. If women want to have offspring that are genetically different, why, we already have the technology: sperm donation!

17. 1) Do you think any/many/all women would take this drug today?

    I think lesbians and single women would take the drug. Some couples with male infertility problems would take it, but probably not the very religious. In fact, I would predict a massive criticism of and campaign against the drug from the religious right.

    Also, when would be/have been the ideal time for the developers to release this drug? (50s; 70s; asap; the future; never)

    From whose point of view? From the developers, the best time to release it would probably be the 70’s. In the 50’s, people would be resistant to it but after the Women’s movement, people would be more open to it. So, obviously you want to start selling it as soon as you can start making money off of it. From my point of view, probably the future, if at all. If society continues to advance, then I think a drug like this will be something people could handle but I’m not sure we’re ready for it now.

    3) a) How do you suppose such a drug would effect society? (domestically and/or globally)
    b) If one side-effect caused all children born subsequently to be female and parthenogenic how do you suppose this would effect society after 20, 50 or 100 years? (This part is crucial so please don’t hold back on you response here)

    I don’t think enough people would take it in order for there to be global changes in the population. Possibly in some areas if enough women took the drug and girl/women became the numerical majority there could be complications.

    Think of China where couples have sex selected males for their only child. Having more men than women in the population causes problems. I’m not sure having more women than men would cause the same problems but there would be difficulties. The majority of women are heterosexual and they don’t like having sex with men or relationships with men just to have babies. There might be fierce competition for men even if women could have babies on their own. Would this give even more power to men?

    If the majority of the population are women and homosexuality/heterosexuality is a continuum, are more women going to enter into lesbian relationships? Are the women who marry men going to have a higher status than women who don’t marry men or vice versa? What about women who take the drug vs. those who don’t?

    I feel as though if women started taking the drug now, the “natural” way would be considered superior to the drug and women who married men would carry even more status than it already does. Possibly in a place where women are the numerical majority, more opportunities will be open to women but what about the few men? Will they still be at the top of the food chain, merely for being men? I think they would today, maybe not in the future.

    4) On a personal note: What would convince you to take it if you would not initially?

    I plan to stay child-free regardless of how I could get pregnant but you would not have to convince me to take the drug if I did want children. Having a clone of myself would remove many doubts about parenthood that I would have.

    If I were to find a man I wanted to have children with, it would be harder to convince me to take it. I would want him to have the same experience as me, to have a child he shared his genes with. Obviously if that weren’t possible, the drug would be another option to think about.

    I wonder if you took the drug, what would the law do if you either divorced your husband or never married your partner? Would he be responsible for the child?

    I think something that would convince people to take it is if somehow the resulting child would be a “superhuman:” smarter, better looking, more athletic, healthier, etc.

18. It’s been done (not a drug, it was genetic engineering) in David Brin’s Glory Season. But that was speculating on a society long, long after the parthenogenetic ability was wired in; thinking about how it would affect *our* society is fascinating.

    A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski also had such a society. Her novel was published much earlier than Brin’s (1986 vs. 1993 according to Wikipedia). I also thought it was also a better story but that’s just a matter of opinion. 🙂

    Re: the original question, I’m enjoying reading the responses but I don’t have any thoughts of my own to share.

19. @ Sam1:

    Wrong:

    “Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in many plants, some invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some bees, some Phasmida, and parasitic wasps) and a few vertebrates (such as some fish,[2] amphibians, reptiles,[3][4]and very rarely birds[5]). This type of reproduction has been induced artificially in a few species including fish and amphibians.[6]”

20. The only things in nature that produce asexually are single-cell organisms some fungus and plants. That is it, no insects, no birds, and especially no mammals.

    Not true. There are lizards that reproduce parthenogenetically.

    It’s not actually that hard to envision a means by which this could work. While genetic recombination would be really, really hard and lead very, very rapidly to fatal levels of inbreeding, all you’d have to do is take the process that an egg cell performs after meiosis, where the telomeres are reset and the omnipotentiality of the cell is set such that, on fertilization, it can be an omnipotential zygote cell with a normal life span, and set that process into motion on a normal cell. Basically, meiosis without meiosis. It turns out it’s not actually true that a woman is born with all her egg cells — we do have egg stems that continue to produce eggs throughout our lives — so the “drug” (which would really need to be a retroviral cocktail or something) would modify the egg stems such that the new “eggs” were actually full diploid cells.

    The important consideration for human use would be a means of triggering “fertilization” — which wouldn’t be fertilization at all, it would be the release, implantation and division into a blastocyst of a diploid “fertilized egg” that in fact carries the mother’s DNA in exact form rather than a combination of DNA. Obviously if every cell a woman releases on ovulation will turn into a mini-her if it implants, the birth rate would be devastatingly high and could result in the deaths of many women from overbirthing. But if the means is mechanical or chemical, not something within the woman’s control, then it can be taken from her, which means the biological ability to parth means very little as society can still block her from being able to do it. It would have to be some mechanism that the woman needs to consciously perform but which does not require anything outside her own body, and *that’s* the really hard part, as it would require brain wiring that humans just don’t have. (Although if the side effect was that all women who can parth have total control over their own fertility and can choose to ovulate, or can choose to self-abort within the first month, or whatever, then it would be a lot more popular… even women with no intention of parthing would like *that* side effect.)

    In David Brin’s Glory Season, it was seasonal, and triggered by hetero sex. So men were still needed. If I recall, women who had hetero sex in summer would be stimulated into parthing; women who had hetero sex in winter were capable of being fertilized. So men had an interest in winter sex with women, women had an interest in summer sex with men, and thus both parties maintained an equilibrium which was female-majority but not to the point where men were in danger of going extinct. Most likely, however, this is not the way a hypothetical drug would work, as current humans don’t have any truly consistent adaptations to summer/winter (there are a lot of things some of us do, and some things most of us do, but nothing that all of us do.)

21. Sorry, I’m about to commit the sin of not reading the rest of the comments, but the few I did read are all future-sci-fi and I’m reading on Victorian England currently. And if you’re going to set this in the 50s, the 1850s you could get men and women behind it, since women weren’t supposed to want sex but “lie back and think of England” to make him some sons.

    If the question about super-power side effects is “how to convince people to take this” — make it a side effect? Go towards the end of the Victorian era and have it be the “mistake” effect of yet another snake oil cure? Go for 1860s and you can make it a non-cure for the plague…

    Yeah, I have no thoughts for future-sci-fi at the moment, I’m going back to my Victorian book.

    oh, re: 3b) it says “all children” so I’m assuming you mean 100% of parthenogenesis babies will be girls who reproduce that way? You can probably just ignore my Victorian era obsession then, the only way the men in charge would ever allow it was if they either didn’t know, or thought they’d get sons from it. Setting it before the invention of the pill would be um, interesting, though.

22. Sam1 — check the link Lizzie gave @19 and scroll to sharks, they’re XX/XY and certain species seem to be able to reproduce by parthenogenesis — though it’s definitely not their main means of reproduction, looks more like a way to ensure they manage to meet a male shark to sexual reproduce with actually. Which could be an interesting spin on some of the problems outlined above, if human women could wait generations to find “the right man”?

23. A number of science fiction authors have posited societies where they merge ova from two women to get a zygote — Joanna Russ (Whileaway) and James Tiptree (“Houston, Houston, do you read?”) come to mind. This would get around the issue of genetic diversity.

    Obviously, this proposal is a bit different, though, since the point is that it’s asexual.

24. Alara Rogers: other way around, I believe, in “Glory Season”. Winter clones and summer “vars”. I always wanted to read more about that world; interesting social system (though, to me, the writer’s voice came through as somewhat disapproving of it. Could be just me on that.).
    Experiments have been made with selecting turkey strains (Beltsville Small Whites, in every reference I found) for high rates of parthenogenesis; in turkeys it occurs through doubling of chromosomes in haploid cells, and therefore all turkeys produced this way are males. Not that this is particularly relevant to the discussion, but I find it fascinating and somewhat disturbing.
    There is also Suzy McKee Charnas’ “Motherlines” for an example of a parthenogenetic society, although the means used to trigger pregnancy in that case could be seen as more than a little disturbing. Also Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” and, for another (rather sideways) Tiptree example, “Your Haploid Heart”.
    It is rather interesting to contemplate the different effects on society of such a drug available and used openly, and of it used underground – especially before the days of DNA testing for paternity.

25. 1) Some women would take it, but not all. Not sure which half would be in the majority.

    2) I think that women who want a kid but who aren’t in or don’t want a long-term relationship with a man, or who can’t find a man who meets their personal standards for partnership or parenting, would use it.

    I think that women who want a kid but who have a partner with a history of genetic defects would use it.

    But these categories aside, I don’t think all that many women would use it. I haven’t got much to base it on other than gut instinct so I could easily be wrong.

    As for how the drug could be improved? Minimal side effects, lower cost, etc. Look, if it does what it says on the bottle, that’s enough.

    Note that I take it for granted that the drug doesn’t limit women to parthenogenesis, but just makes it an option. A side-effect of ‘you can’t have babies with a man, ever, after taking this drug’ might be a bit too high. If that’s in there, take it out as a risk/side effect.

    No idea as to the best time to release it, so I’d say ‘as soon as it passed FDA approval’ or something like that – once it was tested, proven to work, and the associated risks quantified – all on a sound statistical basis.

    3) a) How do you suppose such a drug would effect society? (domestically and/or globally)

    Probably have fewer women getting into bad relationships simply for the purpose of having a child.

    3b) I took the female-child-only thing for granted. I mean, come on. If a woman has two X chromosomes, and has a male child, where did the Y chromosome come from? O_o

    How it would effect society? Probably a slight increase in the number of women. I don’t have the economic chops to predict the effect this would have in an economic sense, or in a valuing-of-women sense. On the one hand, you’ve increased the supply of women… But on the other hand, in democracies all of those women have one vote each. Would women be empowered and valued more, or less? I don’t know.

    One possible gotcha is that the daughters born from the drug would be genetic clones. Which means that any virus that adapts to the daughter could easily infect the mother. If a mother has three parthenogenic daughters, and they have three, and they have three, then if we allow for a minor rate of mutations per generation, all of the granddaughters would be very nearly clones. They would all be at greater risk of infection from each other than from the rest of the population.

    Whether or not that matters on the larger scale of things depends on the number of parthenogenic daughters born to each generation (note that traditional male/female children won’t be clones and so don’t count in this analysis), as well as how young each generation is at the time they decide to have those daughters.

    4) Well, having a uterus would be a nice first step. ^_^

    I wouldn’t need any convincing. I suspect that if I were a woman I would prefer to reproduce with a mixture of someone else’s DNA, because that’s exactly how I feel as a man, and I don’t think that my opinion on this would change with my gender.

    If I were a woman with a husband, and my husband had genetic issues in his background? Yes, I would use the parthenogenesis drug. Otherwise? Nah, I’d just nail my hubby a lot (assuming of course my female heterosexual self has a similar libido to that of my male heterosexual self).

    If I were a woman and had a wife, then I would want to have a child by mixing both of our genomes together. If that technology is available and I were in that situation, I wouldn’t take advantage of parthenogenesis (I’d also prefer to not be the one who went through the pregnancy – it would be an option, but why go through that if you don’t have to?)

    But if that technology wasn’t available? Then yes. I’d use the drug.

    And in either case, if I were a woman that wanted a kid and just couldn’t find a partner that was up to my standards for long term commitment and parenting, then I’d just use the drug to have a kid on my own.

    So my decision would be situational. I wouldn’t need a lot of persuading once the situation was right.

    Okay. Now to go read everyone else’s responses. ^_^

26. This is kind of interesting. I do expect that there would be a pretty high stigma, and also that only a limited number of people would initially take it.

    I suspect that the really hardcore Twisty Faster types and any remaining lesbian separatists would take it and probably try to get as many others, possibly using coercion now that the drug was actually available. If successful in making it get used very much, I suspect that there would end up being some kind of Last Alliance of the Patriarchy. Things could get really bad.

    I suspect that heterosexuality would be a considerable limiting factor to prevent people from maximizing female children. I can also imagine that someone (not necessarily antifeminst) would try to counter this with something that would increase number of men born; either sex selection of natural male children or the replacement of a parthenogenic X chromosome with a surrogate Y chromosome to provide male children through parthenogenesis, who are otherwise clones/autogamy childeren of the mother.

    Internal control of fertility/early self-abort is definitely something which should be implemented for all women through transhumanism _anyway_, as well as a slew of other body conscious-control things like being able to control one’s apetite, weight setpoint, etc that will benefit humanity.

    I think that more likely to happen and possibly more relevant are in vitro techniques that would allow lesbian couplings to provide female sexually reproduced children and gay couplings to provide male or female children.

27. I think that some things are just best left to nature to do best. Human medicine is really good especially when it’s used to combat diseases and help people to have fertility when they otherwise wouldn’t but things like this are just like trying to play god and are bound to end very badly IMO. I think we should leave such a crucial part of our society — that of baby making — in the hands of the usual biological process to produce a baby, which has been finely tuned through billions of years of evolution to be the best way of forming a baby.

28. Internal control of fertility/early self-abort is definitely something which should be implemented for all women through transhumanism _anyway_, as well as a slew of other body conscious-control things like being able to control one’s apetite, weight setpoint, etc that will benefit humanity.

    But don’t you think that changing human genetics in this way kind of defeats half of what being human is about?

    Half of the challenges in peoples lives are about overcoming their limitations and challenges and becoming better people. If everyone is able to simply make themselves the best person ever by modifying their genetics, then that kind of takes all the fun out of everything you know?

29. @Gabrielle Physiologically speaking, it wouldn’t have to only work on cis women, but could work on anyone (cis or trans) who had the internal organs (uterus) to gestate. In order to create a world in which the drug would work on cis men and/or people without viable wombs

    That’s just a rather roundabout way of saying “trans women need not apply,” without actually referring to trans women. At least, the needn’t apply unless someone did all that dreaded “extra work” — God forbid someone making up a story should do that!

    In any event, given this obvious aspect, the question in the hypothetical about whether “all women” would take is both offensive and surprisingly clueless. I would expect something better here.

30. Sorry for the typos. It tends to happen when I’m annoyed.

    It probably isn’t even worth bringing up how problematic it is to make references to cis women (and trans men) as being “genetically female.”

31. If such a drug were introduced into our society, the main effect would be to spark a moral panic among the professional misogynists in government and organized religion. The very idea that men might be rendered obsolete in the baby-making department would galvanize a massive backlash. You’ve seen how freaked out conservatives get at abortion, contraception, no-fault divorce and anything else that reduces women’s dependence on men and the patriarchal family.

    Ironically, I don’t think the drug itself would prove to be very popular among women. Some women would like the idea of asexual reproduction for its own sake, but I don’t think most would.

    There has never been a shortage of men who are willing to donate sperm, literally or figurative, and walk away from their offspring. The biggest stumbling block to women raising children on their own are social sanctions from the larger patriarchal society, not the mechanics of reproduction per se.

32. I think this has to be compared with sperm banks, which are the closest analogue with real-life technology. The main difference is that the offspring are clones and thus guaranteed XX, which would shift the demographics somewhat.

    Not needing men is not the same as not wanting men, though. Most likely a new equilibrium would be reached with fewer men than now, but not zero. (I’m assuming a scenario where parthogenetic descendants can still reproduce sexually with natural H. sapiens in addition to asexual reproduction, rather than a speciation event.) Alara’s scenario of a patriarchal third world versus a majority-female first world sounds plausible, but I think you would see a lot of ‘mail-order grooms’.

33. 1-2. Basically a response to this quote:

    No one would take it if it locked their daughters into *having* to reproduce parthenogenetically, but if it’s an option, where you can choose parthenogenesis or you can have sex with a man and choose sexual reproduction… oh, yeah. It would sell like hotcakes.

    I’m not so sure. If you *have* to reproduce parthenogenetically, *and* you get to choose when you start a pregnancy, then this is 100% failsafe birth control.

    If it’s an option in that you can switch “modes” but in any given “mode” there is only one form of reproduction, it would supplant any form of birth control that didn’t have other benefits (eg. condoms for STDs).

    But even if totally irreversible, I can see it selling. If for no other reason than as an alternative to getting tubal ligation. It could also be an effective fertility treatment for many women who cannot conceive, assuming the drug works like that.

    3. I’m going to assume that once you become parthenogenic then you cannot sexually reproduce. Societally I think it would add a bullet point for the anti-choicers and move some middle-of-the-road people to their camp, since there is now an option for women that would guarantee no children from sex acts (which means it’s no longer “punishment for sex” or even “punishment for wanting children”, but possible “punishment for wanting to maybe have children which includes a male genetic component, but not now”). Obviously the “life of the mother” defense is untouched. Genetic testing might become more routine from absentee fathers claiming the kid isn’t theirs, it’s a parthenogenic kid.

    (I’m not saying I agree, because I don’t, but there is that).

    I expect slowly but surely this would overtake standard reproduction. In the scenario where parthenogenic children are all female and sexual reproduction is not possible with an asexual female, what you have are in fact two separate humanoid species with a quirk that allows one-way transfer for about half of one species to the other species. You have mono-gender “parthens”, female humans, and male humans, with male humans being the odd one out physiologically. Presumably the parthenogenic children are still likely to sexually desire men even though it doesn’t produce children, so there if nothing else, sexual desire will provide a societal impetus to ensure a significant population remains sexually reproductive. This might make men more “the sex class” than women as demographics change.

    Lesbianism or asexuality might slowly be selected for in the parthenogenic populaiton on an evolutionary timescale, gradually reducing demand for male reproductive humans in a positive-feedback cycle.

    If parthenogenic humans can be distinguished on sight from female reproductive humans, then that opens up a whole bag of worms with respect to sexuality and transness (Assigned-at-birth as reproductive female but identify as parthenogenic? Easy fix. Assigned-at-birth parthenogenic but identify as reproductive female? That’s tricky).

    For the sake of argument — and biologically this seems less likely, but let’s go with it — let’s imagine parthenogenic females can choose whether the child is XX or XY (can’t choose gay / straight, can’t choose cis / trans, but usually gets a straight cis female for XX and usually gets a cis male for XY). In that case I can imagine a future where everybody was parthenogenic and most people were male, for population control reasons, given that the female population has tends to be more of a limiting factor on population growth than the male population. Over an evolutionary timescale, again, asexuality and/or androsexuality would be selected for in all people.

    4. I’m male (and cis) so I wouldn’t be taking this drug. But I’ll take this question to say that maybe in the short run you’d get more parthenogenic humans with a “superpower”-type incentive, in the long run the reproductive humans would need the superpower.

34. That’s just a rather roundabout way of saying “trans women need not apply,” without actually referring to trans women. At least, the needn’t apply unless someone did all that dreaded “extra work” — God forbid someone making up a story should do that!

    Well, that becomes a different story.

    A story in which trans women have the ability to give birth would be a story about bodily modifications that give people who do not have uteruses or ovaries the ability to develop those organs, and then that raises the issues of whether or not cis men would choose to use the same technique. That’s a fascinating story idea, actually, but it’s not the same story idea as exploring human parthenogenesis.

    Now, if you have *both* human parthenogenesis *and* humans can choose to grow organs that permit them to give birth… then you get into the whole question of “would cis men choose to become birth givers, if it were the only way they had to reproduce in a world where enough cis women have become parthens that they cannot find partners?” And on a personal level you can explore the phenomenon of trans women with parthen sons, and how do you relate to a person who is basically your clone except they are of a different gender? Would the ability to become birth givers if born without birthing organs blur the lines between cis men and cis women to the point where people stopped caring about or discriminating on the basis of someone’s trans status?

    But that’s not the *same* story as “what happens when you introduce human parthenogenesis into our current biology?” Unless the means of becoming a parthen is really invasive, to the point where very few people could undergo the process (surgery, major retroviral genetic rewrite of the body, controlled cancer-like growth of new organs), it couldn’t also simultaneously give people who lack ovaries and uteruses the ability to parthen. The modifications required to make someone who is currently a birth giver (defined as “has birth-giving organs”, not as “chooses to give birth”) into a person who can reproduce parthenogenetically would be very different than the modifications required to make a person who is not a birth giver into a birth giver. Doing both at the same time makes it a very, very different story… in one you’re exploring giving birth givers a power that they currently don’t have and shifting the balance of power between cis women and cis men as a result; in the other, you’re exploring eroding the difference between cis and trans by allowing trans women and cis men to become birth givers, thus erasing the distinction between birth givers and non-birth givers that’s traditionally been the basis of nearly all gender discrimination and thus also erasing any need to perceive cis or trans women as separate categories. There’s no reason not to write the second story, but just because a person wanted to write the first story doesn’t mean they *need* to write the second story. They’re about totally different things.

    (And the statement of “all women” above would also exclude infertile cis women and post-menopausal cis women, so it’s not even a statement that includes all women in the first place. Probably makes more sense to not have said “all” in the first place, but I think what the OP is getting at is the question of, does the world become a place where all birth givers choose to reproduce parthenogenetically? “All women” and “all birth givers” are not the same thing, and isn’t the same thing even if you were deliberately excluding trans women from “all women”… but I just invented the term “birth givers” now, so it’s hard to argue that someone should have used it instead of shorthanding to “women”. :-))

35. It’s interesting that this is a recurrent theme in the feminist world.
    In fact reducing or eliminating men is key in the vision of very important feminists like Mary Daly.

    This analysis cached my attention:

    So over the generations, you’d have a conflict between majority-female developed-world nations with full female equality

    Powerless men mean female equality? Very interesting, in other words men not having rights/power that women don’t have is the same as equally.

    I don’t mean Alara believes is needed, but is very common, when we read the equality indexes to find out that they only point a fail when women are discriminated or in a lesser position. The contrary is seen as neutral or good.

    In some reptiles the females have two different kinds of chromosomes (ZW). In other words they are like men in that regard,
    Others are de terminated by temperature. Very different from us.

    Ok to the questions:

    1)Yes; Starting by many separatist lesbians and feminists (as an act of rebellion agains patriarchy) together with people with reproductive issues. As someone mentions this will not be massive initially, since we already have sperm banks.

    2) Today and to the future.

    3) a) It will be a total change. Stating by massive bullying of boys by girls and some teachers (both sexes) on the schools. (I am a teacher). The sitcoms will be even more fill with the idea of useless men. Some people will try to invent some reasons for men to be important, and some men will turn violent (they are doing it already, trying to protect their privileges). Some men will kill themselves at a even higher numbers than now, and beg female attention. Male prostitutes will rise like crazy. Some men will become overachievers, trying to win some respect. Others will become slackers and toys. We (women) will be swimming in a confidence level like never before. Feminist prophets will be read again with new eyes. Some of us will be concern abut male children. We will take control of the parliaments and new laws will be pass. The key of them will be differential treatment of women and men as suggested by Baroness Jean Ann Corston or as implemented on the “ley integral de la violencia domestica España”. After a while violence against women will become a rarity. Abortion will extend to full term with no constraints. No more “shared parenting” laws will affect a increasing percent of the population.

    b) This will delay sales as women with romantic inclinations will tend to believe that that girls will grow into lonely women. Once this prove false and the hetero-only mindset dies, this will change.

    4) I will not take into account any side of the super powers option. Girls born of parthenogenesis could be more healthy or smart, but they are not going to fly. I am not planning on reproducing, adoption maybe if I have support and the money. So not taking the drug. If I got hit by a cosmic ray and decide to become mother, then I will take the drug if I am not in love at the moment with a male.

36. Some women want a child, but has no suitable male partner. Lesbians come to mind, but also many single women who want a child would take it.

    If all the children where female, you’d over time end up with males a minority. Either many of the children are lesbian, which I suppose is possible if being lesbian is (partially atleast) genetic, or if growing up with lesbian parents makes you more likely to become lesbian yourself, or else the mating-market will change a lot.

    It doesn’t take more than 10% or so surplus of one gender for a mostly-heterosexual dating-market to become very noticeably tilted.

    Anyone who’s been young and spent time in an environment where one gender dominates, knows that it’s got a huge influence on the dating-market. Essentially, the gender that is rare, gets more power to decide whereas the gender that is common gets less power.

37. …for the rest of their lives! Dementia patients pregnancy wing at the hospital!

    3) a) How do you suppose such a drug would effect society?
    It is only right and fair if men can somehow do it too.

    b) If one side-effect caused all children born subsequently to be female and parthenogenic how do you suppose this would effect society after 20, 50 or 100 years? (This part is crucial so please don’t hold back on you response here)

    4) On a personal note: What would convince you to take it if you would not initially? (imagine a spectrum: at one end the drug only has the initial parthenogenic effect; at the other you would become a parthenogenic deity/animal/man)

38. Nooooooo! Too soon!! Wasn’t finished can’t delete!!!
    sorry.

    My point is that the story would be interesting to me if men had the power to clone themselves. Would there be 6 Romney boys or 6 Mitts?
    I think if pregnancy was comfortable or pain-free, I would assume there would be heterosexual identified men cloning themselves. It would be like evangelical mega churches filled with the clones of the preacher!

39. It would be fascinating, I think, if this made women capable of, say, extracting the Y chromosome (and possibly others) from sperm, giving the possibility of children that are majority-the mother’s genetics but male (and possibly with selected other genetics from the father).
    I have to say, from my point of view, a lot of what’s fascinating about theoretical parthenogenesis is the idea of taking this particular genetic combination that I happen to carry and raising it in such a way that it doesn’t end up a bundle of nerves as an adult. Agree that ableism would inevitably come into all this.
    Epiphany, that’s rather a scary thought, and leads into the idea of people being pushed hard towards a particular career path, because their parthenogenetic line has always done that particular job – I imagine parthenogenesis leading to ever-stronger arguments about nature v. nurture, and each side being ever-more convinced that the evidence supports them.

40. If this is a single-dose drug that permanently alters you, you could make it a genome-altering transposon or or lentivirus-based treatment for versimilitude.

41. No one has mentioned narcissism as a component of breeding. The partheno pill would be a magnet to this personality type. An increase in female sociopathy would be one potential result.
    Would oppressed third-world women decline, or would they create a child in covert rebellion? I see privileged single and lesbian cis women making extensive use of it; I also see a subplot of a married dying woman doing it so her husband has a “spirit daughter” to raise, not necessarily a Good Thing if he sexualizes his mourning.
    Genetic breakage due to environmental pollutants is a risk to parthenos after several generations, especially in certain locales.
    I chose to be child-free, so I’d leave the pill on the shelf. I’d definitely buy the book, though.

42. I see privileged single and lesbian cis women making extensive use of it

    Hmm. Depending on cost, it could open up doors to significantly less privileged cis women. It would depend on whether or not and which insurance covers it in the US, and whether or not it costs significantly less than sperm banks.

43. I feel like this drug wouldn’t be made because it doesn’t benefit men sexually. But of course, let’s say it’s made—I feel like it would be very highly restricted. I wonder—in this future, is society highly different from today? I think that would change my answer. If say, men are dropping like flies, well, then yes, I think a lot of women/trans men want/use the drug.

    But I feel like women do have the opportunity to reproduce “without” a man now, and either 1) women aren’t necessarily jumping at the chance 2) it’s not by choice

    I mean, I would think women would still like to have sex with men regardless.

44. I think a lot of women/trans men want/use the drug.

    Why am I not surprised?

45. So, I’ve been thinking about the cissexism encoded in this idea, and I think that for it to be properly addressed, the writer is going to have to be specific about how this pill is supposed to work. Does it stimulate ovulation and then cause two eggs to fuse together? Does it cause the body to produce stem cells in some way and then grow a baby from one of them? Given that this is SF and not fantasy, in which one could just say one day we woke up and every fertile person with a womb could reproduce parthenogenically, which is a different kind of story, there needs to be a nod toward some kind of biological mechanism here.

    Once that’s down, we can start thinking about what would happen if a trans woman took the pill: does she need gametes of her own for it to work (i.e. it stimulates ovulation and then fuses two eggs) or not (the stem cell approach)? What does it mean for trans women if the former, in which they are excluded by this opportunity offered to most women, and what is the range of reactions they choose? If the latter, and I think this would be more interesting, to a certain degree, could the society that invents such a drug also invent womb transplants, in which case it would create the dynamics we have around other organ transplants…with added tension around the sexual identity of an oppressed minority group. First there is the rarity of a matching donor, and the subsequent waiting lists (done the same way other organ donation is done, as well as the occasional cis woman who is firm in her decision not to have children donating her womb to a trans friend), but then there’s the political situation. How long does it take to develop the surgery (presumably in response to trans activism and pressure)? How many doctors practice it (judging from the number of doctors who do GRS, I’d go with damn few)? What kinds of pressure are they under from the kind of right-wingers who harass doctors who perform abortions? Does the possibility of such a transplant create tensions and hierarchies among trans women? How do various kinds of feminists react to the existence of the procedure and how does that affect the relationship between feminism(s) and trans women? And so on.

    Whether or not those issues are the focus on the story/novel, and that will depend on the plot the writer develops, I think the key to avoiding cissexism and transerasure is to fully flesh out the culture generated by the types of procedures newly available, remembering trans women are often used as scapegoats by both the right wing and by radical feminists, particularly separatists. I think that if I were writing this story, that is how I would address the concerns raised by Donna and Gabrielle.

46. in b4 this whole thing reminds me of Gattaca http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

47. Thanks for giving the question so much thought, EG. What bothered me more than the details of the story itself was the casualness of the cissexism displayed both by the person whose idea this was and a number of the commenters — specifically, the repeated use of “women” and “all women” to refer only to non-trans women. Whether that’s due to bigotry, ignorance, or sheer laziness I can’t say, but I’d like to be able to expect better here, especially from people who claim to have an imagination.

    By the way, there are people now (in Japan and South Korea, I believe) who claim to be working on the development of procedures for transplanting the necessary reproductive organs. But they’re clearly contemplating the use of such procedures only to help “real” women, whose desires for pregnancy and childbirth are obviously far more genuine and important than anything trans women might wish for. Most trans women I know realize full well that this sort of thing is pie in the sky in terms of ever being a realistic option for trans women, given issues of cost, scarcity, and cissexism, and prefer to dream — of course, to them it’s far more significant an issue than the mere hypothetical exercise represented by this thread — of the day when trans women will somehow be able to grow their own reproductive organs and give birth to children who would be related to them genetically.

    Finally, I also suspect that all those “pregnant man” stories have led people to seriously overestimate the percentages of trans men who not only still have the requisite reproductive organs but, if they’ve transitioned hormonally, would be willing to stop taking testosterone for this purpose. I can’t even imagine the circumstances under which I would have been willing to stop taking estrogen and anti-androgens, prior to the transition-related surgeries I had, whether for reproductive purposes or any other reason, even if I hadn’t already been a parent. I wasn’t willing to stop even after I learned that I had developed pituitary gland tumors as a result of the medication I was taking!

48. That is fascinating…and surely, once the technology is developed, it’s “only” a matter of time before a trans-friendly doctor–maybe a doctor who is trans–starts to look into how it could work for trans women? I don’t have faith in much, but I do have faith in medical progress. Eventually.

49. i feel like…. an amoeba

50. Not answering the questions directly, but here are some of my thoughts. These are just speculations about what would happen in the immediate future after the procedure was introduced, assuming that happened in today’s political climate. The longterm effects are hard for me to even speculate on.

    1) I don’t see any reason this story couldn’t include trans women. If you’re already imaging a pill that gives someone the ability to reproduce asexually, you can certainly imagine a surgery that would give trans women the necessary organs and whatever else. Assuming the procedure is non-reversible and for some reason requires a total sex change, I think there would be very few cis men willing to go through with it. It would be interesting to think about what would happen to the small group of XY parthens that would result: they’d probably be somewhat excluded from both sexually-produced and XX parthen society. The only way I could see this modification having a huge effect on the overall narrative would be if asexual reproduction became the main method of reproducing and cis men were so eager to reproduce they would be willing to undergo SRS to do so (both conditions seem unlikely). In that case the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ would go through huge changes and could no longer be linked to anatomy. It’s hard to imagine what that world would look like.

    2) Cis lesbian couples would probably already have the ability to reproduce together long before asexual reproduction was invented. (After all, that can already be done with mice, although the success rate is low and it’s –imo– extremely unethical.) So I don’t think asexual reproduction would necessarily be a lesbian thing. Assuming for the sake of argument that we had asexual reproduction but not XXxXX reproduction, though, I think there would actually be a big rift among lesbians over it, though, rather than it being universally adopted. Some couples would prefer not to have a third party’s genes in their family and would feel that their child would be somehow more “theirs” if zhe was the clone of one of the partners. Other couples would worry that if their child was the clone of one partner zhe wouldn’t really belong to both of them and that the relationship would end up being unequal. There would probably be a lot of nasty arguments between lesbians who chose to reproduce asexually and those who went the sperm bank route. Sperm bank lesbians would accuse parthenogenesis lesbians of being man-haters. The more vicious critics would probably also suggest that asexual reproduction was going to produce a whole bunch of ugly, hairy, man-hating hippy-lesbians. A small group of hardcore lesbian separatists would rail at the sperm bank lesbians for supporting patriarchy. This group wouldn’t have any real power, but there would be a lot of complaining about them anyway. Less radical parthenogenesis lesbians would get defensive and some might slip over towards the separatist side. Well-meaning straight feminists would feel the need to chip in, offering their support for one side or the other. Straight radical-ish feminists would hate the sperm bank lesbians for passing up the chance to reproduce without men, and would say things like “I’d do it if only I didn’t have to get along with my Nigel, so how can you possibly give up this opportunity?!” Straight liberal-ish feminists would be divided between those who simply support the right of lesbian couples to choose their reproduction method for themselves and those who would point out that a parthen kid is still not genetically related to both partners and would criticize lesbians who choose asexual reproduction for arbitrarily preferring a clone to a half-sperm baby, thereby “reinforcing essentialist notions of sex and gender.” That last type of straight feminist might also try to frame their arguments as support for “real” lesbians by saying that the parthenogenesis route contributes to a negative definition of lesbianism as solely exclusion of men, erasing lesbian sexuality. If parthen babies could only reproduce asexually, this debate would die out fairly quickly, but some sort of division might remain between parthen people and sperm-produced people. There would also be extra pressure on the clone-children of lesbians to be lesbian in order to establish lesbianism as genetic, but many would probably be straight, bi, asexual, etc, and a few would probably be trans.

    3. A lot of the pressures I described above w/r/t lesbians would also apply to other people who chose to take the pill. For a long time it would be banned or strictly regulated and granted to a very small number of women. Religious conservatives would claim it was against the will of God. Liberal dudes would claim they had no problem with a woman making her own reproductive choices but were worried about a reduction in genetic diversity (however, if pressed, they’d slip up and reveal their fear of becoming obsolete). Efforts to slow the distribution of the drug would include both outright bans on ‘protect the family’ grounds and sneakier claims of dangerous side effects and the need for more research.

51. Since the top predictor of poverty is single-parenthood, I have a hard time believing that a large proportion of women would willfully choose this path. Some middle- or upper-class women obviously would, but I doubt that raising a child alone would appeal to most women. Assuming that the drug would only work on cis women, it would be a useful solution for lesbians or women with an infertile male partner, if those individuals did not wish to adopt or use a sperm donor.

    Leaders of polygamous communities such as the FLDS would probably appreciate such a drug, as it would save them the trouble of kicking out “surplus” men from their communities.

    @ Lizzie: The daughters born through parthenogenesis would be clones of their mothers – they’d be like identical twins raised a generation apart. The mother-daughter relationship would inevitably be different for a clone (as compared to a daughter who shares only half your genes).
    Regarding (1), I think it would really depend on how many women wanted that clone parent relationship. I know my mother had a hell of a time raising and socialising me, and I don’t think I’d want to raise a kid with the same temperament I had in my early years!

    I know that this is a common myth, but twins aren’t actually clones of each other. Not only are there minor genetic differences, but temperament is obviously independent of genetics. The pop culture fuss about twins exacerbates the already absurd assumptions people make about multiple-birth progeny: see the overused “good twin/evil twin” storyline, the cringeworthy “twins speak in unison” myth propagated by the Harry Potter blockbusters, the ridiculous “twins read each others’ minds” plotline used to liven up dull horror stories, etc. One would assume that since twins make up about 2% of the American population, people would be hesitant to reveal their own ignorance about their fellow citizens, but apparently not. My apologies if I misunderstood your post.

52. 3(a) Robert Palmer and others like him form cults, forcibly cloning females for their own sinister purposes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrGw_cOgwa8

    On a more serious note, this hypothetical drug could also easily be abused, I see evil masterminds behind the sex slavery trade cloning armies of their best earning slaves and raising them for future exploitation in some dystopian future world. Pregnancy of a good earner is now a bonus to the trade, not a detriment – research in causing the parths to grow faster is initiated. You could also see racist groups using the drug to create armies of “perfect” humans from their selected proto-mother bloodlines. This project vaguely reminds me of the Nazi baby experiments performed where women fitting the Aryan mold were impregnated by German officers, had their babies taken and raised in some assembly line factory in order to boost the line of blond/blue eyed people.

53. Sorry, I made it through a lot of comments, but not all of them. Forgive me.

    1. Have you seen the movie Gattaca? Future society, obsessed with genetics; almost every human in that age has been genetically engineered before birth to give them ‘the best shot’ at life. The few naturally-conceived children seem to have a different status than the other humans; for one, they’re kind of genetically inferior, and two, they’re referred to as being born ‘out of love’ or something like that. The circumstances of conception seem important. Are you the product of your mother spontaneously ovulating a parthenogenic cell? Or are you (possibly) the result of a loving coupling between a man and a woman?

    I know not all ‘natural’ conceptions are spontaneous, love-filled events, but there could be an element of that in society. The circumstances of conception could become very important in your status in life.

    2. Think about this drug in reference to Rush Limbaugh’s recent tirade against ‘sluts’ who use birth control. He doesn’t want to pay for them to have birth control because he thinks it’s paying them to have sex. What if we’re paying, through insurance or single-payer healthcare or whatever, for women to take this drug? Then Rush gets what he wants and the women don’t have to be slutty sluts (cough cough) to go have a baby, but sex with a man is still out of the picture. Would people like him be satisfied by this? Or would he rail against this as unnatural and awful just like he does giving drugs to women who don’t want to have babies?

    I’m guessing that a lot of the conservative language about gay marriage (1 man + 1 woman = marriage) would also be used to justify discrimination against parths. We’d see a lot of ‘1 man + 1 woman = baby’.

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