In 2050 sex will no longer be for baby-making. Hanky panky will be for fun and fun only.
That's according to a leading professor, who says in just 35 years time most babies in the Western world will be born through IVF, leaving sex a recreational pastime.
Professor Carl Djerassi, the Austrian-American chemist who invented the Pill, told The Telegraph he believes couples in the future will freeze their eggs and sperm when they're young before being sterilised.
Djerassi, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, claimed advances in fertility treatment will lead to a ‘Manana generation' for whom delayed parenthood is a realistic and convenient option.
“Women in their twenties will first choose this approach as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions or the absence of the right partner or the inexorably ticking of the biological clock," he said.
“However I predict that many of these women will in fact decide to be fertilised 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."
Djerassi, went on to say the advances will end the need for the Pill and will eradicate abortion, as no children will be unplanned or unwanted.
“Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilisations 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.”