Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 436–444 doi:10.1093/jlb/lsw033 Book Review BOOK REVIEW The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. By Henry T. Greely (Harvard University Press, 2016. 400 pp.). The End of Sex: and the Future of Human Reproduction promises, with its title alone, to be an intriguing and provocative book. I have delighted in telling people that I was reading a book about the end of sex just to witness their inevitable raised eyebrows and quizzical looks. For anyone familiar with the scholarship and lectures of Professor Henry Greely, the choice of title should come as no surprise. It is witty and provocative (‘the end of sex?!’), but also informative, letting the reader know in a few short words that the book is really about how humans will reproduce in the future, not whether human sexual activity will come to an end. And, of course, it is a play on the word ‘sex’, which has many different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Professor Greely makes this point clear early on. In the second paragraph of the introduction, he states that the book is not about the disappearance of all the things we mean by the word ‘sex.’ Humans will still (usually) appear at birth having physical attributes of one sex or the other... Our descendants will still (almost all the time) have genetic contributions from both an egg and a sperm, thereby achieving the mixing of parental genes that is also sex or at least sexual reproduction. And, I am confident, people will continue to practice sexual intercourse in myriad different ways and for almost all of the current varying, complicated (and uncomplicated) reasons.1 Instead, the book is about the end of sexual intercourse as a way to conceive. Greely’s title is, of course, slightly hyperbolic. He doesn’t actually claim that sex will never be used for human procreation. Rather, The End of Sex argues that emerging technologies may lead us down a path where sex, as a means to conceive children, ‘will largely disappear, or at least decrease markedly’.2 I use the word ‘may’ intentionally because Professor Greely is exceedingly careful throughout the book to note that his claims about the various factors that could lead to this outcome depend on speculation 1 2 HENRY T. GREELY, THE END OF SEX AND THE FUTURE OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION 1 (2016) Id. C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Duke University School of Law, Harvard Law School, Oxford University Press, and Stanford Law School. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] Book Review r 437 about the future—a process that involves some very difficult predictions (even some that he says one would have to be ‘certifiably insane’ to make).3 His thesis is that reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)—which currently allow us to identify genetic defects in embryos created by uniting egg and sperm outside a woman’s body— will, in combination with advances in genetic testing and stem cell research, ultimately lead to this reproductive future. Advances in genome sequencing, he argues, will allow for ‘cheap, accurate, and fast sequencing’ of an embryo’s genome and ‘will give us an increasingly deep understanding of what that sequence means for disease risks, physical characteristics, behaviors and other traits of the child that embryo would become’.4 Stem cell research, he adds, will allow for the creation of eggs and sperm to avoid the expensive and physically taxing process of retrieving human eggs for IVF. ‘The result will be a cheap, effective, and painless process [he] calls “Easy PGD”’.5 To support his thesis, Greely comprehensively explores aspects of science, economics, law, and politics that he believes will contribute to this evolution in reproduction. Eminently qualified to engage in such interdisciplinary analysis as a well-respected law professor and bioethicist, Greely divides his book into three parts, shaped to some extent around the different disciplines. It begins in Part I, as most such interdisciplinary work does, with a description of the relevant science. Greely covers a lot of ground in this section, beginning with the building blocks for reproduction—cells, chromosomes, DNA, and genes—and then moving on to explain reproduction among living organisms, infertility and its treatments, genetic testing, and, finally, stem cells. Each piece is necessary to help a reader understand how human reproduction may change in the coming decades. The middle section and, to a large extent, the heart of the book— Part II: The Pathway—discusses a range of factors in science, law, and economics that could lead to this future of human reproduction. And, finally, Part III—The Implications combines bioethics and legal analysis to address the potential risks and, to a lesser extent, benefits of Easy PGD. The challenge in writing a book like this, which is intended for a range of audiences— the lay public, scientists, physicians, legal scholars, bioethicists, policy makers, etc.—is that one must contend with a broad range of knowledge on a variety of topics. Greely acknowledges that he is trying ‘to make the information understandable to anyone interested’, while also recognizing that some of his readers ‘will have educational and professional backgrounds that give [them] far more knowledge in [some] areas than [he] can convey or know’.6 This is particularly tricky in Part I, where, like everyone who writes in the interdisciplinary field of law, science, and ethics, he must describe the science accurately and comprehensibly so that readers of varying backgrounds can engage with the legal, policy, and ethical discussions that follow. Greely’s solution is to offer his readers the option of reading the entirety of Part I—which he acknowledges some readers might find ‘far too long’—or a summary of the ‘relevant biology in a nutshell—and not 3 4 5 6 ‘[P]redicting politics even a year in advance is hazardous and predicting it twenty to forty years in advance is certifiably insane’. Id. at 169. Id. at 3. Id. Id. at 7. 438 r Book Review a big one (pistachio, maybe?)’ in just five pages.7 While he acknowledges that he does not dive into the full depths of the relevant science,8 he offers a rich and exceptionally clear description of the biology underlying human reproduction and essential to Easy PGD. Professor Greely, who is a master educator in this interdisciplinary world, achieves just the right balance of accuracy, nuance, and qualification in describing the science. Having come ‘to biology late in life, as an amateur’, who ‘fell in love with it’, one of his ‘goals for this book is to bring to some of [the readers] a love of biology’.9 While I am undoubtedly biased, sharing his fascination with biology, it is hard to imagine a reader, with only a glimmer of an interest in the subject, not being captivated by his descriptions. Greely’s wonder at various biological processes comes through in his vivid account of the ‘bizarrely complicated’ and crazy ways in which humans and other species reproduce.10 Part of the success of this book, in addition to its excellent description of the relevant science, is how present Greely himself is throughout. He eschews the silly admonitions to scholarly writers to avoid using the first person, as if ideas do not emerge from a living, breathing person with particular tastes, perspectives, and personality. Greely seems to relish peeking out from behind the author’s veil by occasionally lacing his careful descriptions and analysis with personal observations, reactions, and humorous quips. Sometimes these moments are quite raw and personal. When describing some of the complex ethical dimensions of Easy PGD, he recounts how, at a conference he had helped organize, a panelist with a significant disability ‘rocked’ him by claiming that if he had had his way, she would not have been born.11 He asserts that he ‘of course... didn’t wish she had never been born’, but then queries, ‘Did I?’ Often, these ‘Greely sightings’ arise in his humorous side observations. For example, when parenthetically describing how hard it was to discover the actual size of ovaries since ‘almost all references just call them the size of an almond’, he tells us that, after ‘substantial digging’, he learned ‘they are about 4 centimeters, or roughly 1.5 inches long’, which, he quips, ‘seems like an awfully big almond’.12 And when describing how some organisms reproduce by creating an ‘identical daughter organism’, he suggests that ‘[o]n the face of it, clonal reproduction looks better’ than sexual reproduction because there is no need for ‘dating games’.13 As a final example, he describes how difficult it is for human sperm to make their way toward the egg to try to fertilize it, observing that ‘there are no road signs, and, even if there were, sperm can’t read’.14 There are many other examples, which I don’t want to spoil for those who haven’t read the book. In addition, to making the book highly enjoyable, these humorous and personal observations help make the scientific concepts memorable and easier for readers to grasp and retain. They also exemplify Greely’s ability to take seriously a complex subject with a playfulness that is refreshing and all too rare in scholarly work. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Id. at 8. He is too harsh in describing it as ‘a fairly shallow look at the science’. Id. at 8. Id. at 7. Id. at 44. Id. at 247. Id. at 122. Id. at 29. Id. at 38. Book Review r 439 Although Greely offers a brief critique of Easy PGD at the very end of the book,15 his primary goal is not to develop a normative position as to whether we should or should not let human reproduction change in the ways he imagines it will. In fact, he is quite explicit in acknowledging that that is not his focus, even though others have recommended that he ‘take a position and fight for it, guns blazing’.16 Greely seems to believe that a focus on whether Easy PGD should become a part of our future is not fruitful because various forces will inevitably move us toward that end point. Instead, he has other goals for this book. First and foremost, he wants to make a descriptive claim about what human reproduction might look like in the future. In addition, he wants to entice his readers to become ‘interested in’ the issues Easy PGD will raise and to educate them about this future technology so they can make intelligent choices about the role of this technology in their lives and in our future society, including what limits, regulations, or restrictions, if any, we should put on its use.17 As he charges the reader in the closing paragraph: I beg you – use [the] information [from the book.] Pay attention to these issues, think about them, talk about them with others. Help us all to shape a world where these new technologies bring as much benefit, with as little harm, as humanly possible.18 While the bulk of the book in Parts I and II is, respectively, descriptive (the science) and predictive (the pathway to Easy PGD), Greely does attend to some of the normative aspects of this technology in Part III. Here Greely covers a vast terrain of many issues that he acknowledges ‘have been explored at great length and depth since well before the technologies for even primitive prenatal genetic tests’.19 Specifically, he addresses the pros (briefly)20 and the many potential cons related to safety; family relationships; fairness, justice, and equality; coercion; and gut-level repulsion. Rather than make strong normative claims regarding these many issues, he presents them with the kind of evenhandedness (generally)21 that law professors strive to achieve. And because his goal is to educate more than to proselytize, Greely, also like a law professor, raises more questions than he answers22 (a trait that law students don’t always relish in their professors). But he is open about his views on many issues, most notably the strengths and weaknesses of the various arguments that could be made with respect to these issues. Where Greely’s work is most original and offers the greatest contribution to the literature, however, is not in his synthesis of the science or in his discussion of the ethical challenges PGD could present. It is in Part II—The Pathway, where he explores how science and other societal factors will likely shape the development of future reproductive technologies. Rather than emerging as an end goal of researchers, physicians, or even 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Id. at 312, 314. Id. at 4. Id. Id. at 315. Id. at 203. He notes that many of them are ‘implicit in the earlier chapters of the book’. Id. at 204. He doesn’t hide his strong aversion to certain kinds of arguments or objections, most notably those that fall into the category of ‘just plain wrong’ in Chapter 17. He notes as much in the introduction. Id. at 4. 440 r Book Review society, Easy PGD, he argues convincingly, will arise ‘as a “secondary” use, or effect of other developments’ in science and reproductive technologies.23 But it is ‘biomedical, economic, legal and political factors’, he posits, that will ultimately lead to its ‘clear path to success’24 as a widely accepted method of procreating. Many might be initially skeptical about Greely’s central thesis that Easy PGD will become widespread. I confess, that in reading a small portion of a much earlier version of the book three years ago, I was somewhat skeptical myself, in spite of having previously written about the ways various societal factors routinize the use of reproductive technologies.25 At the time, however, I didn’t have the benefit of having read Part II and the arguments Greely makes about the intersection of many factors that might contribute to human reproduction in the future. Nor had I given much thought to the growing evidence that in vitro human gametogenesis (IVG)—the derivation of egg and sperm from human cells in a laboratory—may one day be possible and used in combination with IVF. Having since written about IVG, however, I share Greely’s views of the future of human reproduction.26 What will undoubtedly make Greely’s thesis compelling to many readers not previously engaged with these issues is his careful and comprehensive examination of the various societal factors and how they will intersect. Greely strengthens the persuasiveness of his argument by studiously avoiding overstatements and acknowledging where there is potential uncertainty in some of his predictions. After he takes the reader through this comprehensive analysis, it will be hard for them not to be convinced that the end of sex, as he defines it, may indeed become a reality. While I share his views that industry incentives, health care financing, regulation (or lack thereof), and politics will likely drive scientific advancements toward Easy PGD, Greely doesn’t fully address two additional factors that will further pave the way: attitudes toward parenting and concerns about liability. The first refers to a notion of ‘good parents’ that pushes future parents toward ever more prenatal analysis, often without a great deal of consideration about what all of this information might mean for them and whether they want all of it. Many have written about this topic with respect to prenatal testing and PGD, arguing that expansion of these technologies shapes norms in favor of obtaining as much information as possible about the future child.27 The idea that good parents should learn all they can about their future child is related to a deep cultural thirst for information. It has propelled efforts to try to make whole genome sequencing widely available,28 with little worry about its potential limitations. Evidence suggests, however, that much of this information today, and even in the future, will be ambiguous and of limited value.29 These norms underlie laws that 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Id. at 105. Id. at 137. Sonia M. Suter, The Routinization of Prenatal Testing, 28 AM. J. L. & MED. 233 (2002). Sonia M. Suter, In Vitro Gametogenesis: Just Another Way to Have Baby?, 3 J. L. & BIOSCI. 87 (2016). See, eg, Jaime King, And Genetic Testing for All . . . The Coming Revolution in Noninvasive Prenatal Genetic Testing, 42 RUTGERS L. J. 599 (2011); Suter, Routinization, supra note 25. GREELY, supra note 1 at 139. See Denise Grady & Andrew Pollack, Finding Risks Not Answers in Gene Tests, NEWYORK TIMES, Sept. 22, 2014; GREELY, supra note 1, at 114; Timothy Caufield et al., Reflections of the Cost of “Low-Cost” Whole Genome Sequencing: Framing the Health Policy Debate, 11 PLOS BIO. 1, 3 (2013). Book Review r 441 require parents to have newborns tested for various diseases,30 in spite of how unusual it is to mandate medical decisions for children.31 And they contribute to strong lobbying for a broad expansion of the scope of newborn screening (in spite of the complexities and limitations of some of these tests), including some diseases for which there are no clear treatments.32 The idea that more information is always better for parents will undoubtedly shape society’s embrace of technological developments that could prevent disease in future children, even if it involves embryo selection and even if it could open the door to selection based on non-disease traits. As Easy PGD becomes safe and available, this technology might ‘reframe people’s thinking about PGD and prenatal selection as not just a means to select against serious disease, but also a means to select the most ideal embryo’.33 Prenatal testing to select out undesirable traits may not be appealing because it requires pregnancy termination. Easy PGD, however, overcomes that limitation by only requiring selection of embryos with desirable traits. Given the strong drive to reproduce genetically and the desire to maximize our children’s opportunities, norms about ‘good parents’ may well evolve to include using Easy PGD, not only to eradicate disease but also to select traits associated with increased advantages. Easy PGD might, in other words, ‘change norms’ about what good parents do, ‘shifting expectations from disease prevention toward “perfection” of reproduction’,34 which would lead to further support and demand for Easy PGD as a means of trait selection. In short, such ‘fine-tuned testing’ could easily become routine, just as current prenatal screening and testing has become routine today.35 Tort liability is another element that could further pave the way toward Easy PGD. As I have argued with respect to current methods of prenatal testing, the threat of wrongful birth claims creates incentives for health care providers to encourage (more or less subtly) genetic analysis of future children.36 In these claims, parents bring suit because they gave birth to a child with an illness that, but for the physician’s negligence, could have been identified and prevented through termination. Similar claims have been brought with respect to PGD.37 Concerns about liability give providers incentives to encourage prenatal testing since it is the surest way (assuming the tests are analysed properly) to diminish the odds of being sued for wrongful birth.38 The desire to avoid such claims in the future may lead health care providers to encourage Easy PGD (assuming it is relatively safe) as the most efficient and comprehensive way to eliminate disease, especially because it avoids pregnancy termination as a preventive measure. Greely suggests that once Easy PGD becomes safe, viable, and affordable, there will 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 Greely points out that not all coercion is bad and cites newborn screening as an example. GREELY, supra note 1, at 310. Sonia M. Suter, Did You Give the Government Your Baby’s DNA? Rethinking Consent in Newborn Screening, 15 MINN. J. L. SCI. & TECH. 729 (2014). See STEFAN TIMMERMANS & MARIA BUCHBINDER , SAVING BABIES? THE CONSEQUENCES OF NEWBORN GENETIC SCREENING (2013); Suter, Newborn Screening, supra note 31. Suter, IVG, supra note 26, at 116. Id. See Suter, Routinization, supra note 25. Id. at 251. See Doolan v. IVF America (MA) Inc, 2000 WL 33170944 (Mass. Super. 2000). Suter, Routinization, supra note 25, at 251. 442 r Book Review be little opposition to it.39 I would argue more strongly that because of these liability concerns there will be affirmative provider interest in it, which will shape patient demand (and further contribute to the norms about what constitutes a good parent). Less likely, but not impossible, is the prospect of liability claims brought by children against parents for selecting embryos with genetic conditions or undesirable traits that could be, or were, identified by Easy PGD. Although one court, in dicta, hinted that such claims might be legitimate with respect to traditional prenatal testing,40 no court has actually recognized such a cause of action. These claims might be more palatable with respect to Easy PGD because they would be based on assertions that a different embryo should have been chosen, rather than that a pregnancy should have been terminated. Nevertheless, they both rely on the uncomfortable and philosophically confounding premise that the child should recover damages because he or she would have been better off having never been born.41 If such claims were ever recognized, they would undoubtedly further motivate parents to use Easy PGD. The fact that norms about good parenting and liability concerns might ‘push’ future parents toward Easy PGD, not only for disease but also for traits, is related to a concern Greely discusses—coercion. He focuses primarily on coercion through government mandates or prohibitions.42 But he recognizes, of course, that coercion can exist in many forms and that ‘[g]overnments are by no means the only possible sources of coercion’. It can also come from ‘employers, health payors, parents-in law, or even spouses trying to force or at least influence, a choice involving PGD’.43 What he doesn’t discuss, however, are the coercive pressures of the cultural norms about good parenting or provider biases that may push parents toward Easy PGD, forms of coercion that are more subtle than many other forms. Subtle coercion can sometimes be hard to recognize and therefore resist. What’s more, if it routinizes this technology, it can affect the degree to which future parents pause and consider whether Easy PGD and all of the potential information it can generate are truly in line with their values and lifestyles. In short, it can affect the decision-making process of future parents. While Greely does not explicitly connect these dots, he clearly cares about the ability of parents to make truly informed decisions about reproduction. Indeed, it may have been his biggest motivator for writing this book—to help parents think about whether and how to use Easy PGD, if it becomes an option.44 But, unfortunately, most parents will not have had the benefit of reading his fine book and it is unlikely that there will be much to counteract the pressures to go along with Easy PGD in a less than fully examined way. This concern is exacerbated by the enormous informed consent challenges that Easy PGD will pose for future parents. Greely is not inattentive to this issue. He suggests that the kind of information future parents might receive from Easy PGD would be ‘sixteen times larger and more 39 40 41 42 43 44 GREELY, supra note1, at 175. Curlender v. Bio-Science Laboratories, 165 Cal. Rptr. 477 (Cal. App. 1980). For that reasons most courts do not recognize similar claims brought against physicians. See Becker v. Schwartz, 386 N.E.2d 807, 812 (N.Y. 1978). In addition, parental immunity would likely be a barrier to recovery in many jurisdictions. GREELY, supra note 1, at 253, 260. Id. at 270. See supra text accompanying notes 17–18. Book Review r 443 complicated’ than his hypothetical description of the results of Easy PGD.45 Pointing to the challenges of sorting through hypothetical information about just five embryos, he worries ‘greatly over... the problem of sufficiently informed prospective parents’.46 And he notes their need for help from genetic counselors, of whom there are, as many have often worried, already far too few.47 But Greely understates the enormity of the informed consent problem, which is not simply an issue of too few genetic counselors (although that doesn’t help). It is also an issue of time, money, comprehension, scientific literacy, numeracy, and the capacity to process complex information. Most significantly, it will be a problem of information overload, which, as many (including Greely himself) have noted, is already something of a challenge with genetic testing and will only become exponentially greater with advances in genome sequencing.48 The concerns so far have focused on the complex and vast amount of information about health risks in an individual’s genome, which will vary by age of onset, likelihood, severity, treatability, and symptoms.49 Potential information about traits will only add to the complexity, especially because it is likely to be highly probabilistic. With Easy PGD, however, the information would concern the genomes of not just one individual, but tens or hundreds of potential embryos. Even if only a portion of the genome were revealed, the quantity of information would likely be far more than 16 times greater than the hypothetical information Greely described for five embryos. It has been estimated that it could take 2–6 hours of discussions with counselors over several sessions to address the potential variants that could be found from the analysis of a single genome.50 Discussing that information for tens or hundreds of genomes would be nearly a full-time job. It is hard to imagine having enough genetic counselors for that level of counseling. But even if we did, would patients have enough hours in their day for such long discussions? And would insurers fund them? Perhaps the greatest problem, however, is that, even were there sufficient hours for counseling and adequate insurance coverage, it would be very hard for future parents to absorb the vast amount of information about different embryos and what it would mean for the health and potential traits of a future child. Comprehension would not be the only problem. Parents would have to process and evaluate the potential tradeoffs of certain health risks and traits in some embryos for different health risks and traits in others. Most important, they would have to determine which choices best fit into their particular values and lifestyles.51 This is not just information overload, but a kind of tyranny of choice that many would find terribly overwhelming, and possibly even paralysing. It becomes difficult, in this context, to determine what ‘properly 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 GREELY, supra note 1, at 194. Id. at 298. Id. See eg, Henry T. Greely, Get Ready for the Flood of Genetic Testing, 469 NATURE 289 (2011); Mark Rothstein, The Case Against Precipitous, Population-Wide Whole Genome Sequencing, 40 J. L. MED. & ETHICS 682 (2012); Sonia M. Suter, Genomic Medicine—New Norms Regarding Genomic Information, 15 HOUS. J. HEALTH L. & POL’ Y 83 (2015). Suter, Genomic Medicine, supra note 49, at 97. Jonathan S. Berg, Muin J. Khoury & James P. Evans, Deploying Whole Genome Sequencing in Clinical Practice and Public Health: Meeting the Challenge One Bin at a Time, 13 GENET. MED. 499 (2011). This is a goal central to genetic counseling. See Barbara B. Biesecker, Future Directions in Genetic Counseling: Practical and Ethical Considerations, 8 KENNEDY INST. ETHICS J. 145 (1998). 444 r Book Review informed’ would or could realistically mean. Even if Easy PGD ultimately offered the ability to select the ‘best’ embryos, however ‘best’ is defined by society or the individual, the task of doing so would be Herculean and quite unlike most other medical decisions we face today. Some have suggested minimizing the information overload problem in the context of whole genome sequencing by sorting genetic information into bins according to the nature of information: eg, early-onset conditions, late-onset conditions, carrier information, etc.52 But such an approach might not be so helpful here. Even if parents were interested in ruling out all embryos with early-onset severe diseases, they would likely be left with a number of embryos that would be similar in terms of broad descriptions. For example, several might be carriers of a few recessive diseases, have increased propensity for some valued traits, decreased propensity for others, and increased risks for a handful of late-onset conditions or psychiatric disorders. To make sense of the relative differences and to choose the ‘best’ embryo among them would require fuller understanding of the nature of the specific carrier conditions, traits, late-onset conditions and psychiatric disorders, as well as their relative risks—a tall order, indeed. Given the persuasive case that Greely makes for the inevitability of reproduction without sex, it seems that one of the largest challenges we will face, in addition to the many he discusses in Part III, will be the difficulty of making the choices that Easy PGD offers. Two possibilities arise. One is that the choices will simply be too overwhelming and Greely’s (and my) prediction for widespread acceptance of Easy PGD will be wrong. The other is that the technology will in fact be widely adopted, but many parents will engage in its use with little thought because choosing among the options will be too overwhelming. Perhaps clinics will offer to do the choosing for parents based on very broad brush strokes about what the parents want in a future child. They might set up algorithms to choose or clinicians themselves might choose. In any case, this could lead to routinization of reproductive selection unlike any we have seen. How it would play out—whether it would lead to a tendency to focus on certain traits and health states and therefore limit diversity and whether it would reinforce societal biases about what features are desirable—is a difficult question. But if it arose, this abdication of choice in the face of a technology intended precisely to promote parental choice could prove just how conflicted we are about altering the way we reproduce. The scariest part about Easy PGD may not be the end of sex, but instead the tyranny of choice. Sonia M. Suter Law School, George Washington University, 2000 H St, NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 52 Berg et al., supra note 51.
© Copyright 2026 Paperzz