Having sex to make babies could become a thing of the past by 2050, according to the professor who invented the contraceptive pill.
Professor Carl Djerassi said he believes sex will be for pleasure only because of advances in IVF technology.
He believes the Pill will become obsolete and couple will choose to freeze their eggs and sperm when they're young before being sterilised.
Prof Djerassi made his radical predictions in an interview with the Telegraph, and spoke about the potential for a 'Manana generation' who are safe in the knowledge that parenthood can be delayed without repercussions.
He said: "The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy.
"Women in their twenties will first choose this approach as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions or the absence of the right partner or the inexorably ticking of the biological clock.
"However, I predict that many of these women will in fact decide to be fertilised by IVF methods because of the advances in genetic screening. And once that happens then IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children.
"Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilisations will occur among fertile women than the current five million fertility-impaired ones.
"For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 per cent."
Professor Djerassi, 91, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, who now lives between London and Vienna, was crucial in the development of the oral contraceptive pill in 1951.
The medication was originally created to treat neurological disorders and to help infertile women.
Progesterone, the active ingredient in the Pill, is produced by pregnant women and helps an embryo to implant in the womb.
It works as a contraceptive because it tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant, triggering a natural contraceptive response in the body.
Professor Djerassi, gave up his scientific work decades ago, and now writes books and plays.
His new autobiography 'In Retrospect: from the pill to the pen' has just been published by Imperial College Press.