IVF is the process whereby a woman's egg is removed and fertilized with sperm outside her body. It can then be frozen to be put back into her womb when she wishes to start her pregnancy. Professor Djerassi believes the switch to IVF will be gradual and done for convenience.
"The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy," he told in the U.K. "I predict that many of these women will be fertilized by IVF methods because of the advances in genetic screening. And once that happens then IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children."
Professor Djerassi believes that with advances coming not only will women be able to get pregnant when they want, they will be able to be sterilized and still have babies down the road. This will remove the burden of having to avoid pregnancy during sex and make the oral #contraceptive #pill, which he played a major role in developing in the early 1950s, pointless.
"Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilization 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 professor, 91, is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University.