Consider the following scenario: Anna and Nicole, 36 and 39 years old, have been close friends since college. They each dated various men throughout their 20s and 30s, and had a smattering of romantic relationships that didn’t quite work out. But now, as they approach midlife, both women have grown weary of the merry-go-round of online dating and of searching for men who might — or might not — make appropriate fathers for the babies they don’t yet have. Both Anna and Nicole want children. They want to raise those children in a stable, nurturing environment, and to continue the legacy of their own parents and grandparents. And so they decide to have a baby — a baby that is genetically their own — together.

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Such an idea may sound fantastical. But technologies that could enable two women (or two men, or four unrelated people of any sex) to conceive a child together are already under development. If these technologies move eventually from the laboratory into clinical use, and the history of assisted fertility suggests they can and they will, then couples — or rather, co-parents — like Anna and Nicole are likely to reshape some of our most fundamental ideas about what it takes to make a baby, and a family.

To date, most major advances in assisted reproduction have been tweaks on the basic process of sexual reproduction. Artificial insemination brought sperm toward egg through a different, nonsexual channel. I.V.F. mixed them together outside the woman’s body. . . .

Humans are reproducing in ways that would have been truly unimaginable just several decades ago: Two men and a surrogate. Two women and a sperm donor. An older woman using genetic material from a much younger egg.

Each development has, in many ways, been deeply conservative, intended to extend or re-create life’s most basic process of production. But as these technologies have expanded and evolved, their impact has become far more revolutionary; they’ve forced us to reconceptualize just what a family means, and what it can be.

For most of human history, after all, families across the Western world were defined in largely biblical terms: one man, one woman, with children conceived through sex and sanctified by marriage. . . .

Things first began to change in the 1960s, as a combination of shifting mores, accurate paternity tests and greater access to contraception prodded courts in the United States and elsewhere to expand the legal definition of parenting to include a genetic relationship, regardless of marital status.

Then, in the 1990s, as reproductive technologies became better and more widely available, the legal norms shifted again, allowing parents to be defined in many cases as those who had desired to create a child, regardless of either their marital status or the child’s genetic origins. In the infamous case of Baby M, a New Jersey judge ruled that a married couple who had employed a surrogate to carry their child had full parental rights to the baby, even though the surrogate was the child’s genetic mother and had gone to extreme lengths to retain custody. . . .

If the revolution of I.V.F. was to liberate reproduction from sex, then the even bigger revolution of I.V.G. is to dismantle completely the reproductive structure of heterosexuality. Once upon a time, defenders of heterosexual marriage could argue that marriage was intrinsically a sexual union of husband and wife, because those were the only unions that could produce a new life. If I.V.G. comes to pass, that will no longer be true. Instead, two men could make a baby. Four sexually unconnected housemates could make a baby. And that changes everything we’ve ever known about sex and babies and marriage.

In the early days of I.V.G.’s adoption, the most obvious users of the technology are likely to be same-sex couples who, for the first time in history, could conceive children who are wholly and genetically “theirs.”

But single women could also choose to employ it, creating eggs to match with sperm derived from friends or family members. . . .

I.V.G. will never replace sexual reproduction of course. And poly parenting, as I like to call it, will never become the norm for most families. But once we start imagining, and then living in, a world of fluid parenting, it becomes increasingly likely that we will also undo or at least revise our centuries’ old conviction that procreative unions — like Noah’s animals — come only in pairs. . . .

I.V.G. alone, of course, can’t create that world. And it will take a long time to dismantle norms of marriage and parenting that have been around for millenniums. But the history of assisted reproduction is powerful and clear: Once we create new technologies for conception, we embrace them. Yes, we go through some stages along the way: We worry about mucking with nature. We fret about designer babies or the possibility of some madman hatching Frankenstein in his backyard.

Then we discover that it’s just the nice couple next door, using an increasingly common technology to create children they love; children who become far less scary as they move out of the world of scientific abstraction and into the realm of the real. Over a remarkably short period of time, we have grown accustomed to those nice parents in our neighborhood being a couple of men, or women, or a single one of any sex. We will get used to them being a threesome or foursome as well. And then we’ll see the new normal as simply the real, and we’ll forget that it was technology that changed this world.

(Excerpt from The New York Times. Article by Debora L. Spar. Photo from Flickr.)

What are your main concerns about poly parenting? How do you think this change what families look like? Share your comments. . .