ABSTRACT
Like the Mississippi River following the spring snow melt, the family landscape is being flooded with new technologies having to do with baby making or not making. The explosion of progress in reproductive technologies is creating choice in a dimension of life we previously consigned to destiny, namely, procreating children. Fertile women can stop baby making with Norplant, RU486 or abortion. Infertile couples can still make babies with the help of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor semen, donor eggs, frozen embryos and surrogate motherhood. Soon, we will be able to exact quality control regarding the health and perhaps the genetic makeup of future children with the aid of genetic screening, genetic engineering, nuclear transplantation, egg fusion, cloning, selective abortion and in utero fetal surgery. A woman can become a mother at age 62. And, if experiments in ectogenesis and interspecies gestation prove successful, a woman will be able to become a mother without herself becoming pregnant.
