The Null Device

The decoupling of sex from reproduction has taken another step, with the announcement of a female oral contraceptive which reduces periods to four times a year. Which is quite sensible, if the doctors who say that a monthly menstruation schedule serves no purpose other than advertising the woman's fertility (which made sense on the ancestral savannah of the hunter-gatherers, but makes less sense nowadays when most women have fewer than two children in their lives). Perhaps eventually, our posthuman successors will be naturally sterile, taking pills to activate sperm or egg production on the rare occasion when they need to reproduce. Given that most people don't reproduce all that often, such an adaptation would make more sense.

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