In any one person, or any few people, it would take a long time to be noticed at all, yes. A sudden cessation of all pregnancies whatsoever I think would be quite obvious within two or three months, maybe sooner, to anyone working in a related medical field; and to everyone on the planet within well less than a year.
[ETA: this was written before I saw dtlique’s latest post.]
If people have no idea why it’s happening, it’s going to be really messy, with various people, groups, and probably nations blaming various other people, groups, and nations, and a wild range of religious as well as political and individual reactions. And even if people are told why it’s happening, not everybody’s going to believe that’s the actual reason, and not some sort of coverup; so it’s going to be messy anyway.
I suspect it would be technically possible to get from where we are now to some form or another of medically-assisted female-only reproduction well before our ability to do so broke down completely. (And would all those children be female, and if so how does that shift society?) But the first question would be whether the disruption caused by freaked-out individuals and countries would be bad enough to prevent this happening; as well as what sort of society/ies would survive the initial disruption. I very much doubt everything would just trot along as normal except for schools etc. closing down year by year one grade at a time – humans aren’t sensible enough for that.
The Dr. Babycatcher department at the largest hospitals likely gets tens of new patients a day (hundreds?). They might dismiss a single day with none as a statistical fluke, but they’ll for sure notice it. I bet they start calling other hospitals the afternoon of day 2 and the story breaks before nightfall.
I find this highly implausible - I mean, it’s not like they’ll suddenly be devoid of work or anything. Besides all the people who were impregnated prior to Day Zero but don’t realize it until weeks later, there are still all their existing patients that are going to be coming in for regular checkups over the course of their ongoing pregnancies.
I do concede that my “years” comment was flat wrong - by about nine months after Day Zero the ob-gyns will be completely devoid of work, and would have had cause to get suspicious several months before that. But there’s no chance whatsoever that anything amiss will be noticed in mere days.
And all the above squared since it was clarified that the onset of sterility is going to be gradual rather than abrupt.
It would almost certainly be noticed first by busy maternity wards. Because there are so many more people having babies than going to fertility clinics, fluctuations in numbers are more obviously serious. A 10% increase in the number of patients to the fertility clinic is merely an interesting oddity - a 10% decrease in the number of women starting their pre-natal care plan is “holy fuck, what’s happening here?”
Add to that, a lot of people get pregnant without really trying - the fertility clinics aren’t going to see them, but their sudden absence in maternity wards is going to be remarked on
Not surprising though - number of children is currently most often limited by desire to have children, not ability to have children. Fertility would have to get dramatically worse before it started to seriously impact numbers of children born more than social factors do
Ah, I missed that clarification and was assuming a sudden change. I agree that if it’s a gradual change it’s going to take longer to notice as measured from the start. Certainly not days.
But even then people are going to notice well before the change is complete, and well before a few months before the last baby is born.
I don’t know how gradual it is supposed to be, but let’s imagine it’s, say, linear over 3 years.
The Mayo Clinic delivers 2,400 babies a year, which means they’re going to get (order of magnitude) around 10 new patients showing up a day. That’s enough people that there’s probably a person or two whose primary job is to onboard new patients. That person is 100% going to notice when they go from 10 new patients to 7 new patients a day over a year.
There are probably also multiple accountants associated with the department. They are going to start getting suspicious after just a month or two of an off-trend.
Childbirth is a pretty expensive thing that is covered under insurance, while IVF usually isn’t. The insurance industry is largely composed of public companies that make quarterly earnings reports, and analysts are going to notice that their profitability suddenly increased.
There are minor news stories every year about the number of babies born based on statistics the Social Security Administration puts out. Everyone is going to go absolutely crazy if fertility drops 30% in a year, not a few months before the 3-year mark at which no babies are born.
Etc.
There’s just too much data out there for this to go unnoticed for any appreciable amount of time.
So I claim that someone will raise the alarm well before we hit say 80% of “normal” fertility, unless the change is so gradual that it gets lost in demographic trends for a long time.
So, the Alien Space Bats are being blamed unfairly. Nice twist, but it’s really … the Deep Government in that pizza place? Chem-trails? Mark Zuckerberg? I’ll bet you anything it Mark Zuckerberg.
They’d be considerably more than suspicious a long time before that; because most people, at least in societies in which decent medical care’s available to more than a few of the population, don’t wait to show up at the doctor’s until they’re in labor. There is such a thing as pre-natal care, and it’s strongly recommended. Most women are going to schedule the first pre-natal check as soon as they suspect that they’re pregnant.
It’s the booking department of the maternity hospital that will notice. “Oh look, it’s half way through January, we’ve got our wards booked at about 80% full through to June, 50% first week of July, 20% second week, and absolutely zero after July 15th. Gosh, that’s odd.”
Sure, but their signups are going to be staggered and still coming in weeks after Day Zero (to the degree there is a day zero). Any given office would probably notice a statistically significant dip in applicants within a month, but given that these things aren’t going to have been coming in at a constant rate anyway they probably aren’t going to freak out until they’ve had time to confirm that the dip is not only present, but unusually persistent - which means giving it time to see whether the numbers will come back up.
I mean, absent foreknowledge that birth rates are going to be ending forever everywhere, a week or two of lighter work isn’t cause for a panic; it’s cause to actually go home on time and get a good night’s sleep for a change.
If the sterility happens to all men instantly overnight, the number of new patients showing up for prenatal care will not drop instantly to zero overnight some X days later. There’s no one fixed time for all mothers in between impregnation and when mom notices she’s pregnant. I agree the prenatal care professionals will notice the drop in new patients very soon after it’s statistically significant, a time measured in days, not weeks. I have no idea what the shape of that curve will look like, except I am 100% sure it won’t be a sharp drop off a cliff.
True; but a total disappearance of first-trimester appointments is going to be obvious. So within about three months after day zero it’s going to be really obvious that there’s a problem.
And that’s if it’s relatively sudden, so that the years and even months before had at most a slightly diminished birthrate. If the gradual dropoff is gradual enough, that is over ten or twenty years, there isn’t going to be as sharp a dividing line. But if it’s a gradual steady dropoff winding up in zero births at the end of year 20, the rate’s going to be low enough by the last few years to be causing major upset. While a steady dropoff over twenty years very likely wouldn’t cause a lot of comment in the first year or two, it wouldn’t get anywhere near even year 18 or 19 without being noticed, let alone to within a few months of no births at all.
The reason a drop in male fertility over the past years hasn’t caused a lot of commotion is that there’s a huge excess of male fertility to start with. The male fertility rate hasn’t dropped enough to cause, by itself, a significant drop in the number of births – the drop that has occured in many places has to do with a combination of better access to better birth control, an expectation that most children born will live to grow up, and a lack of societal support for the costs of raising children.
I feel that I may have confused the issue with my mention that the onset of sterility was “going to be gradual”. I was talking about this post, and the “gradual” appears to be on the order of “over a few weeks” for the majority of the population to be covered, with a few outliers lasting perhaps a month or two beyond that (long enough for forcible testing to be set up to find them). A decline over years was clearly never meant to be in the cards.
I confess I do wonder what’s to be gained by having this all be over and done with by the time to story starts. After the furor dies down and a few years have passed, the main difference will be that nobody will be paying for preschool childcare, and that child murder (and maybe regular murder) will be treated as a capital or no-parole life offense. Oh, and the religions would probably be all wigging out on a continuous basis, even more than usual I mean.
In The Children of Men (the book; I haven’t seen the film), it was the staff at OB/GYNs offices who first noticed–they weren’t making appointments for any new patients.
Before that the sale of pregnancy test kits is going to crater as very few women miss their periods.
When is the test valid? It’s been a while since I had to worry about these things.
I think the imminent destruction of the entire human race would cause “wigging out” among pretty much everyone, with a fictionalization tending to underplay what would actually happen. Things would unravel much more quickly in real life.
Well, maybe I’d better give the scenario I’m thinking of. It’s much different than most people here seem to be envisioning.
There’s a virus that is very contageous, much more than say, measles or norovirus. It’s been spreading throughout humanity without notice because it doesn’t cause any overt symptoms, so just about everyone has it. Its major effect is that it decreases the sperm count of any male it infects, all the way to zero after somewhere between two and four years. Any boys who get it before puberty never generate any viable sperm.
I figure the first to see this trend will be someone at a fertility clinic, since I believe they do sperm counts for pretty much all the male partners of their clients as well as for any sperm donors. But they’ll only be able to point to the trend, not determine its cause. Eventually they track the cause to this virus, but by then it’ll be too late. Perhaps there will still be a few men who have some sperm and they’ll be asked to donate to sperm banks as long as that lasts.
As far as the Alien Space Bats, the origin of this virus is mysterious. When they track it down, it seems to have popped up in several places at once, so it’s suspected of being artificial. But who would do such a thing? Conspiracy theories about it being an alien attack abound… (See “The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon for a similar story concept.)
OK, as I said in the OP, this scenario is pretty much impossible. There’s almost certain to be some males who are not affected by the virus or only affected somewhat. But as I also said, don’t fight the hypothetical.
One of my “thinking about things” a couple of months ago was a similar scenario. What would happen if there were no more human babies? What about housing? How about domesticated animals when the number of humans (caretakers) drop? Professions would start going away. No more high school football after a few years. And so on.
If ICSI-IVF is used (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), only one sperm is needed to fertilize each egg. There are likely hundreds of billions of sperm on ice in the US alone, so that could keep civilization going for hundreds of years. By that time, humans will have figured out cloning…at least sperm cloning.