Women will ‘evolve out’ of menopause

Geneticist Aarathi Prasad recently argued that menopause is on the cusp of extinction — and that women will soon be able to have children at virtually any stage in their lives.

Prasad is the author of the book, Like a Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex.

Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, she argued that menopause is an evolutionary throwback that dates to a time when generations of women were competing over scarce resources — a set of circumstances that made it inopportune for women to have children at the same time.

But now, in the age of plenty, it’s no longer necessary — and it needs to go.

Rosa Silverman from The Telegraph reports:

“'The mood of scientists working on this and looking to the future is we will either technologically or scientifically evolve out of the menopause."

"It is a health risk potentially and it is a real inescapable block on reproduction for one half of us — the women, but not the men. It is something that will probably be overcome.”

Since there were no longer any “benefits” to the menopause, it was now “not normal for nature,” she argued.

“When menopause evolved, women probably died ten years before it happened, it hit in your 50s, on average,” she went on.

“If you're looking at a future where women are going to live to 100, that's half your life when the rest of your body functions perfectly well and your ovaries don't.

Prasad also predicted that gay parents will be able to conceive a child without involving a member of the opposite sex, and that artificial wombs will fundamentally change parenting as we know it.

Image: Twonix Studio/Shutterstock.