We now know that a mother makes an essential contribution of genetic information to her child, as well as providing a protected environment and the physical building blocks for the embryo’s developing body. Biologically and genetically, women clearly are not mere vessels, nor are they redundant. Still, even when confronted by the double helix of DNA, the combination of the sex chromosomes X and Y, and genetic variants and mutations, the belief in the possibility of virgin birth has proved surprisingly enduring. It has ranged from the technology-fuelled optimism of the post-war boom, when doctors hunted for a virgin mother via the tabloids; to the absurd insurance policy, offered in the past decade, that would cover the cost of bringing up a child should you experience a virgin birth.
The simple truth, for humans at least, is that neither women nor men are currently redundant when it comes to making babies. Though the females of many animal species have the option of reproducing quite on their own, for us, a mutual need was established in our distant evolutionary past, and once that treaty was written in DNA, it could never be broken. Never, that is, until now.
In the future, technology might vindicate a few of the ancient, seemingly absurd concepts – at least in some respects. It might someday be possible to create a child from one parent alone. Ironically, because of the way men and women’s chromosomes are arranged, the virgin parent will more likely be a man. Geneticists are cracking the codes that block our eggs from becoming embryos without sperm; stem cell scientists are creating eggs and sperm from bone marrow; artificial wombs are being built; artificial chromosomes are being constructed. And it seems not a minute too soon. Both male and female infertility is on the rise, and some scientists are warning that the Y chromosome, the very thing that makes men both fertile and male, is slowly but surely dying; it now has only around forty-five genes of the 1400-odd genes with which it began the human species. If the Y chromosome’s genetic information essentially disintegrates, what solution could technology offer to sustain, well, us?
This is more than a question of futuristic science. The gender roles assigned to us by the fact of sex have, over the centuries, been used to oppress women and justify anti-homosexual prejudices. If we can make babies without sex, the family structures that we’ve come to view as traditional may well change beyond recognition. All of these attitudes will need to be reconfigured to fit our new lives ‘after sex’.
In this way, the ancient myths of a virgin birth may prove to be the prehistory of our species’ future. As Miss Miniver exclaims in H. G. Wells’s feminist novel, Ann Veronica: ‘Science some day may teach us a way to do without [men]. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of creature needs – these males. Some have no males.’ To which Ann Veronica replies, with some hesitation, ‘There’s green-fly.’
I began to wonder about these paradoxes, ironies, misnomers, interpretations, and reinterpretations of the reproductive role of women. Are the ideas of the ancients all myth, and all those of modern biology fact? What does the future hold in store? What will we face if we start making babies like a virgin? Will we ever be able to return to sex, and do we even have the choice?
PART I
THE MYTH OF THE NATURAL BIRTH
Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up
every preconceived notion
Thomas Henry Huxley
1
PLANTING THE SEED
We must first establish ‘how’ in order to know whether or not we should be asking ‘why’ at all...
Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History, 1987
On 28 October 1533, the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici married the fourteen-year-old Henry, the Duke of Orléans. Catherine brought a substantial chunk of the Medici family fortune to France as her dowry, but as soon as it became clear that her husband would rise to become King Henry II, her true value was seen to be in her womb, in which she would produce the nation’s heirs.
Over the following ten years, however, Catherine failed to become pregnant. This was not for want of trying. A dispatch to the Milanese government reported that her father-in-law, Francis I, had made a point of watching the royal couple in their bed to make sure the union was consummated – and was pleased to observe that each ‘jousted valiantly’. As attempt after attempt failed, rumours of an imminent divorce spread through the court. Catherine promptly surrounded herself with doctors, diviners, and magicians. She refused to travel by mule, believing that the infertile beast would transmit its sterility to anyone who rode one. She consulted tarot cards, charms, and alchemy. She drank the urine of pregnant animals; ate the powdered testicles of boars, stags, and cats; dutifully swallowed cocktails of mare’s milk, rabbit’s blood, and sheep’s urine. Catherine’s sterility was torture to her.
But the young queen was not alone. Henry’s lifelong mistress, Diane de Poitiers, never bore him a child, even though she was already a mother of two. Though she remained an exceptional beauty throughout her life, Diane was nineteen years Henry’s senior, well past peak fertility at the time their love affair began. She knew Henry better than anyone, even Catherine, who was atrociously envious of the king’s mistress. Diane’s advice was that Henry and Catherine should make love à levrette, in the style of a greyhound bitch. She likely suspected that Catherine was perfectly capable of getting pregnant, and her advice
