I recently came across a link to a short story by Gregory Benford, A Desparate Calculus, about a group of scientists who create a contagious virus that has an unusual side effect: it renders its female victims infertile by triggering their ovaries to release all their eggs at once. The virus is generally not fatal (though vulnerable groups such as the elderly might die, as they can in ordinary flu outbreaks every year). The ultimate effect of this is that it will stop most of the next generation being born – though a few women will likely be resistant to its effects.
Given my outlook you can safely guess I didn’t see this scheme as a bad thing :-). I wonder if it would be do-able in reality; obviously it would have ethicists and the general public in hysterics should they find out, so it would need to be implemented surreptitiously. I feel the situation with the world’s rapidly growing population and ongoing biodiversity loss to be urgent enough to justify such a drastic course of action. It would not involve killing vast numbers of people already here, but would prevent (most) future people from being born.
I suppose that measures such as IVF from stored embryos, cloning and artificial wombs could be used to get around the virus, but the last two technologies are not developed and the first can be difficult to achieve.
There would also be issues of body autonomy; the few fertile women might become valued for their wombs, and lose reproductive rights such as access to contraception.
While there are some worthy efforts to give women access to family planning and education in countries that don’t have or allow these, these are just too slow – they may take decades to achieve, if ever. And even in developed countries, women’s access to contraception and abortion are at times under thread from conservative governments – some states in the USA have currently been trying to overturn laws allowing access to these.
