Change came rapidly. I was in the United States when New York reformed its abortion law in July 1970. I remember Alan Guttmacher and Chris Tietze were worried there would be clinical chaos, but the vacuum aspiration outpatient abortion technique, I had first used in eastern Europe a few years and had helped bring to the West, proved a remarkably powerful technique and remains so. They are exhibited in our preferences, such as Bill's desire for multiple partners, and Monica's desire to fall in love. It only helps us to understand behavior, and it is behavior I am trying to unravel tonight.
Reproduction is the driving force of evolution.
Like many of you, I believed these changes were opening a sunny landscape of rational reproductive choice for young and old, for the married and the unmarried, and for the poor as well as the rich around the world. That dream has not been fulfilled. Males and females of all species have different reproductive agendas, and evolution has set them in perpetual conflict. The war between the sexes is fought with other weapons than insulin growth factors. Women are able to bear only relatively few pregnancies in a lifetime, and each one represents a huge investment in time and energy, and optimal patterns of reproduction are profoundly important.