PRINTProblems with procreation
The future of fertility: Movies spawn reproductive woes
COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES
The first baby in decades is a get out of jail free card for Clive Owen and Claire-Hope Ashitey.
April 26, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
If Hollywood shows us a true glimpse into the future, then the future sucks. Whether we’re having too many babies or too few, apocalypse flicks predict humanity’s reproductive woes. But how likely are these scenarios? Vox investigates the plots presented in Children of Men, in which humans can no longer reproduce, and Soylent Green, in which we’re all too good at it.
Singing the baby blues: Children of Men (2006)
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It’s 2027, and the planet is reeling in the aftermath of warfare, pollution and two decades of worldwide infertility. Britain, the only country that hasn’t collapsed, is yoked under a totalitarian government that oppresses the wave of desperate refugees crowding its borders. When Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a refugee, becomes the first woman to get pregnant in almost 20 years, it’s up to ex-activist Theo (Clive Owen) to smuggle her to safety. They pin their hopes on the Human Project, a secretive group of scientists working to figure out the cause of humanity’s reproductive troubles before our species goes extinct.
Rodney Lyles, a reproductive endocrinologist who established the Reproductive Resource Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan., says it is highly unlikely the entire human population would be rendered incapable of reproducing. He points out, however, that radiation can make both men and women infertile. Fertility clinics advise cancer patients to freeze sperm or eggs before undergoing radiation because the concentrated doses can damage ovaries and testes. In theory, fallout from a nuclear war could lead to infertility. Of course, in the case of a nuclear war, we’d be lamenting more than fertility loss, Lyles says.
“The sperm counts would be the least of our problems,” says Ronald Wilbois, an OB-GYN who runs the Infertility and IVF Center in St. Louis. In nuclear fallout, people would face more immediate issues than shooting blanks — such as radiation sickness, thyroid cancer . . . that tentacle sprouting from your left kneecap.
Besides, “in nuclear fallout, the amount of radiation in the environment required to sterilize you would kill you first,” Lyles says.
Even if some unknown agent could bottom out sperm counts or cause miscarriages, we’ve got technology to handle it. In vitro fertilization, in which egg and sperm are joined outside the body, can overcome many factors causing male and female infertility. “If worse comes to worse, we could clone ourselves,” Wilbois says. “We’re almost able to do that.”
Assisted reproductive technologies are never mentioned in Children of Men. Nor does the movie ever reveal the cause of humanity’s infertility. Although critics and audiences laud it as one of the most realistic sci-fi films to hit the big screen, the fertility loss scenario is unlikely. “But it makes for a great movie,” Lyles says.
Look at all the people: Soylent Green (1973)
Two hundred years ago, English economist Thomas Malthus shook his finger at humanity and warned us to stop breeding like bunnies. The film Soylent Green is the ultimate Malthusian doomfest, showing us what could happen if we overpopulate the planet.
In 2022, the Big Apple swarms with 40 million disgruntled New Yorkers. A few get spacious living quarters and real food. Everyone else gets to claw at one another in the streets over food rations called Soylent.
Scarily, the scenario presented by Soylent Green — minus the movie’s infamous revelation — isn’t that far off according to David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University.
Pimentel has calculated Earth’s “carrying capacity,” or the number of people Earth can sustain with its finite resources and says humanity has two options: 2 billion people living in relative comfort or 10 billion mired in misery. Pimentel says that 60 percent of the world’s population is malnourished because, at 6.5 billion people, we’ve passed the point at which Earth can support us all at a decent standard of living. And it will only get worse as our numbers continue to swell.
To avoid this catastrophe, Pimentel says we’d need to average one child per couple. Over the course of 100 years, the world population would continue to rise for awhile then crest and finally drop down to about 2 billion.
Not everyone believes that poverty and malnourishment stem from population growth. In 2001 the United Nations released its World Population Monitoring report assessing the planet’s future. According to the report, while the population increased by about four times during the last century, the world’s real gross domestic product increased 20 to 40 times. This wealth increase would allow the world “not only to sustain a fourfold population increase but also to do so at vastly higher standards of living.” The UN cites “political instability, economic inefficiency and social inequity” as the root of the world hunger — not overpopulation.
But food isn’t the only issue according to Pimentel; people need clean water and fossil fuels as well. Both of these will be in short supply if we hit the 10 billion mark. Some way or another we’ll have to get our numbers under control, he says. “If we don’t do it, nature will.”
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