Think you’ve seen it all? Look at this report from The Telegraph [London]:

Women are increasingly seeking inappropriate IVF treatment because they do not have the time or inclination for a sex life and want to “diarise” their busy lives.

Wealthy career women in their 30s and early 40s, some of whom have given up regular sex altogether, are turning to “medicalised conception” – despite being fertile and long before they have exhausted the possibility of a natural conception.

They are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for private IVF treatments – even though they have unpleasant and potentially harmful side effects – because they believe it offers them the best chance of “instant” pregnancy.

Further: Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and fertility expert, said that in the past five years he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of patients seeking “inappropriate or premature” IVF treatment.

“Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex,” he said. “Conception has become medicalised. It’s too clinical. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships towards medicalised conception.”

Mr Dooley practises at Westover House clinic and the Lister Hospital, both in south-west London, and a clinic in Poundbury, Dorset. He said: “I have people who come to me for IVF who haven’t got time for sex. Those people don’t care about looking for a lifestyle or maximising their natural potential.”

So, the contraceptive revolution allowed sex without conception. Then the bio-tech revolution allowed conception without sex. Lost in all this is any biblical (or even organic) understanding of marriage and the meaning sex within the marital relationship. Procreation is severed from the one-flesh relationship and pregnancy is scheduled like business appointment.

I cannot think of a more graphic example of what happens when human beings begin to think of themselves as autonomous units, whose desires and needs can be disconnected from transcendent purpose and organic function. Sex, marriage, and procreation can be fully disconnected and then can be independently directed. George Orwell must be laughing from the grave.

On the marriage front, The Telegraph also reports: Marriage is in terminal decline, Government figures showed yesterday. Within 25 years nearly half of all men in their mid-forties and more than a third of women will not have walked up the aisle.

In the same period, the number of people cohabiting will have more than doubled to nearly four million.

The figures published in a Population Trends report by Whitehall actuaries prompted fresh warnings from family campaigners that Government policies had marginalised marriage.

Columnist Cathy Young sees trouble among young college women. She responds to the recent report that increasing numbers of young college women intend to be stay-at-home mothers for their children. Writing in The Boston Globe, she observes:
What’s clear is that, in the 40 years since the rise of the modern women’s movement, large numbers of women blessed with the opportunities denied to previous generations have not followed the egalitarian feminist script. Instead, they have, to a greater or lesser extent, embraced traditional female roles — much to the chagrin of feminists such as Yale women’s and gender studies professor Laura Wexler. ”I really believed 25 years ago,” Wexler told the Times, ”that this would be solved by now.”
Young identifies the problem, not with oppressive men, but with women who favor traditional roles as wives and mothers. Women who prefer the more traditional roles — who see a particular responsibility for mothers in child-rearing — are practicing their own form of sexism, she argues:
If there is a solution to this conundrum, it is greater flexibility of gender roles in the home. But to move in that direction, we need to get past the notion that the only obstacle to equality in parenting and homemaking comes from sexist men clinging to patriarchal privilege. Women are just as likely to regard child-rearing as their turf and to regard the freedom to choose between various options of work-family balance as a female privilege. Yet few feminists have confronted the hard truth of this female version of sexism. What’s more, all too often, feminism — academic feminism in particular — has been inclined to treat men as ”the enemy” rather than potential equal partners. Until that changes, feminists are doomed to wring their hands over young women’s abandonment of equality.
How far will she get with that argument?

Revolutions are fueled by ideas. The cultural upheaval represented by the age of polymorphous perversity has been grounded primarily in the ideas of three individuals: Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, and Michel Foucault. To understand the force and speed with which this philosophy of polymorphous perversity has impacted and changed the culture, one must first understand the ideas which undergird it.

The transformation now taking place in Western culture has been fueled by a multi-pronged, comprehensive strategy aimed at undermining the traditional foundations of Western civilization. In psychology, medicine, politics, and law, cultural revolutionaries have gone on the offensive. Their assault has not been confined to those fronts alone. The postmodern prophets of polymorphous perversity have also conscripted education and even theology into their service.

The National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a massive research report on the sexual habits of Americans aged 15 to 44. The most interesting data concerns the teenagers.
As reported in The Washington Post: Slightly more than half of American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, with females and males reporting similar levels of experience, according to the most comprehensive national survey of sexual behaviors ever released by the federal government.
More: The data also underscore the fact that many young people — particularly those from middle- and upper-income white families — simply do not consider oral sex to be as significant as their parents’ generation does. “Oral sex is far less intimate than intercourse. It’s a different kind of relationship,” said Claire Brindis, professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco. “At 50 percent, we’re talking about a major social norm. It’s part of kids’ lives.”
From The Los Angeles Times: James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a reproductive health organization in Washington, D.C., said the study showed that society was undergoing a social transition, with women and girls becoming more sexually confident. “It calls into question the stereotype of boys as hunters and girls as prey,” he said. “Something going on here is creating more balance between the sexes than we have seen before.”
This is just amazing — Mr. Wagoner seems to celebrate the fact that in our current “social transition,” girls are “becoming more sexually confident!” Which is to say. of course, that the girls are catching up to the boys in terms of sexual expectation, aggressiveness, and demands. I guess that passes for moral progress at Advocates for Youth. As a quick look at their Web site reveals, this is not a group that advocates sexual abstinence until marriage for teens — not even close.
This was the subject of Monday’s edition of The Albert Mohler Program. The full report, “Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002,” is available through the NCHS/CDC Web site.

For the last half century, the goal of America’s cultural elites has been to disconnect Western society from Judeo-Christian morality. By subverting the prevailing norms of marriage, the family, and sexuality, they hoped to establish a new age and culture of polymorphous perversity. The massive social transformation that is now taking place in America–the jettisoning of tradition, the overthrowing of fixed institutions, the normalizing of the abnormal–has not come about by accident. It is the result of a comprehensive strategy intended to change the way people think at every conceivable level.

The sexual issues now confronting our nation–from the breakdown of the family to same-sex marriage–are really pieces of a much larger puzzle. In order to understand what is happening, one must look carefully at the entire picture, the entire trajectory of Western civilization over the past century. What we face today are not merely individual, isolated issues, but rather a massive social transformation which has not happened by accident and which will not break apart on its own.

The Guardian [London} reports: Fertility ships where British couples will be able to receive treatment forbidden in the UK could soon be anchored off the coast in international waters. Entrepreneurs are planning to hire ships to offer treatments that include inseminations by sperm from anonymous donors or more controversial techniques such as gender selection.
More: Ships off the coast could offer insemination with sperm from anonymous donors, which some couples prefer. Floating fertility clinics would also get round other aspects of the law which childless couples might find burdensome, such as the rule in Denmark that frozen embryos must be destroyed after two years, or the prohibition in many countries on sex selection. “Taking advantage of the international shipping legislation would not be illegal,” said Mr Schou, at the sperm bank in the Danish university town of Aarhus where anonymous student donors are plentiful. “The idea is to have ships staffed with professional people from the local country. UK doctors would be employed and take care of UK patients. There is a market for hundreds of ships in Europe and the most obvious markets will be around the UK and Italy. It is just a question of how quickly they can organise. The finance is there because it is such a huge market.”
A few years ago, activists sponsored an abortion ship. Now, we face the prospect of an artificial insemination ship — taking advantage of the seas in order to skirt the law.