Is the Next Sexual Taboo a Taboo on Sex Between Parents?

Sociological and medical changes will separate the two functions whose historical connection was the institution of family: sex and parenthood. This will be the true end of patriarchy

The Joy of Parenthood - Jean Bulland  (Source)

Will the natural way we bring children into the world seem like blatant irresponsibility to future generations? Where are the sweeping changes in family structure and gender relations leading us? Will a new paradigm emerge to replace the nuclear family, the last social structure that has survived more or less since the Stone Age? To what stable form of relationships can feminism and the sexual revolution lead us?

It seems undisputed that the family unit is in the deepest crisis in its history, hinting at a paradigmatic change that is on the horizon. The end of the historical process of dismantling all social frameworks - from tribe, to community, to clan, to extended family - is rapidly approaching the splitting of the atom of society: the family unit. The half-life of a nuclear family - the period by which half of families break up - is getting shorter. In such an unstable state of weakening social glue, a phenomenon known as phase transition may occur, happening rapidly when enough bonds weaken, like in the sudden transition between states of matter: from solid to liquid or from liquid to gas. Then, a new form will be created in which social particles - parents, children, men, women - can rearrange themselves, freed from binding ties like the institution of marriage, and the entire society will transition to an unprecedented state of matter in human history.

It seems that two basic opposing forces are currently acting powerfully on the human particles that make up our social fabric: 1) Children need stability. 2) Romantic and sexual relationships are inherently unstable. What constellation can reconcile these forces that tear people and families apart as a matter of routine?

In fact, the only stable constellation that can combine them, which does not attempt to return to the anachronistic arrangement - whose success is doubtful in the current psychological climate - where one of the forces manages to suppress and overcome the other, is a dichotomous separation between parenthood and sex. In such a separation, which may also be anchored in social convention, personal law, or even a social taboo, parents will reach a new understanding of their responsibility towards their children. The new responsibility will be derived from the understanding that it is a great injustice to bring children into an empirically unstable system like romantic relationships, that the choice of a partner as a sexual partner sometimes clashes head-on with the criteria for choosing a suitable partner for parenthood, and that it is better to avoid from the outset linking these two completely separate functions - now that technology allows artificial insemination. Thus, the revolution in fertilization technology will be able to do for parenthood what the pill revolution did for sexuality - and complete the revolution of separating parenthood from sex.

The complete disconnection between sex and procreation is also prevented by medical developments. It is possible that future generations will look with horror at the genomic irresponsibility of having children naturally, just as we look at pregnancy without ultrasound and medical tests. Today, about 3% of the child population suffers from significant genetic damage (from mental retardation through autism and mental illnesses to a variety of genetic syndromes) and much higher rates suffer from a variety of problems with a genetic basis (from personality disorders, attention deficit and depression to a tendency for severe diseases in adulthood). In addition, we are witnessing a rapid decline of tens of percent in the quality and sperm count of men in the Western world, to the point of a future threat to natural male fertility, and in contrast, a steady increase in the age of pregnancy entry for women. All this, alongside phenomena currently unexplained by science such as the autism scandal - a dramatic increase within a few decades of two orders of magnitude in the prevalence of a syndrome that, unlike mental illnesses for example, has no documentation in human cultural history and may be a new phenomenon. All these will certainly influence the transformation of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in artificial insemination into a social and medical norm - which will replace sexual intercourse as the accepted way of bringing children into the world.

But it is possible that the game-changer for the disconnection between sex and procreation will actually stem from developments in the Third World - not the First. The day is not far when it will be possible to genetically enhance children and choose desirable traits with a decreasing degree of risk and financial cost. Will it be possible to prevent the rich in China, for example, or other countries with non-Western cultures, from performing such enhancement? And will the rich in the West agree to stay behind when Chinese children (for example) have a genetic advantage over them? The genetic race is inevitable. It will not be possible to control every genetic laboratory around the world and it will not be possible to eliminate children created from such enhancement, and they will become part of society. Therefore, it is likely that the era in which children come into the world as a result of sexual intercourse is coming to an end, and this will fit perfectly with the sociological trends led by feminism and the sexual revolution.

How will such a society actually look? It is likely that one of the great transformations of our time - the transition of countless social and conceptual structures from a hierarchical structure to a network structure - will also affect the structure of the family. In a situation where couplehood changes according to the desires of the heart, but each child is created with conscious and fixed agreement between two partners for its upbringing, it is possible that a common social structure will be a variety of partners, in parallel or throughout life, and in contrast a small number of partners for joint childbearing. Another possible common structure might be a child who has one legal parent who is assisted by sperm or egg donation. All this, without any dependence on sexual orientation, which will normalize all sexual orientations within the fabric of society by the very separation between sexuality and parenthood.

The change in the structure of parenthood will fundamentally change siblinghood as well. The normative siblings will be step-siblings, and families will resemble networks of connections more than family trees, which will constitute the true end of patriarchy. The choice of a partner for parenthood will perhaps remind of earlier periods and will resemble most of all a matchmaking - a cold rational decision regarding the characteristics of the intended, which will certainly be more successful than romantic marriages (a relatively new invention in historical terms and full of internal contradictions in psychological terms).

Technological changes in personal mobility and interpersonal communication will also make social structures that are currently technically cumbersome realistic and will enable living arrangements that are almost impossible today. The autonomous vehicle will be able to transport children between parents and frameworks without the need for parents, augmented reality will create long-distance communication of the quality of interpersonal communication in the same room, and virtual work from home will allow unprecedented flexibility in the geographical location of human beings. Finally, it will not be understood at all why previous generations insisted on tragically and ridiculously linking two such contradictory areas: parenthood and sexuality. The wisdom of generations and countless dramatic works teach that this is a recipe for emotional disasters, whether of parents or children, and therefore, as happened with sexual relations within the family - a social taboo on sexual relations between parents will gradually form.

The paradigm of dichotomy between sexuality and parenthood certainly has many advantages, but in relationships between human beings there are no perfect solutions. What will a society do where sex between parents is taboo - if it happens and a couple of parents fall in love with each other?