Traditionally, when new electronic military technologies became available, there was always a pervasive rumor that “they would make you sterile.” This caused great fear and trepidation among soldiers.
So here is an idea that maybe its time has come. Not as a real thing, but as a cautionary warning to those who seek to “play God” with reproduction.
Pretend that some unnamed company has invented a single pill, that if one is given to a man, woman, or child, it will permanently and irreversibly sterilize them. And that millions or even billions of these pills had been made, warehoused, and that vast numbers were stolen and are missing.
Purely as a thought problem this is a horrifying possibility, and would probably make a terrifying horror movie. (Though some in the “scientific” community would applaud the concept as a great idea.)
Suddenly, tyranny and genocide become *easy*. If a tyrant has a hated and despised minority, he can give each and every one of them a single pill, perhaps in their food, and they will eventually be entirely gone.
Likewise, with an enemy nation, even if it guarded its food and water, if somehow, anyhow, such a pill could be administered, the hated enemy or religion would be gone forever.
And hatred could turn into terror. One political party sterilizes the members of a competing party. All criminals are sterilized.
Eventually the pill becomes more feared than nuclear weapons. If anyone is adjudged as sterile, which is not naturally uncommon, by the way, they would be assumed to be a victim of the pill, and demand retaliation.
Men could slip women a pill for the guarantee that there would be sex, but no pregnancy. And women could do the same to their husband, if they didn’t want him impregnating any other woman.
In short, the world turns into a race to preserve your own fertility and sterilize everyone else. Every person turned against every other person.
It would make one hell of a movie. It would make Hell on Earth.
But more than anything else, it would be a profound allegory to what the birth control pill represents, just taken to an extreme. And to show how those that hate life now, if empowered, would likely be more than willing to exterminate most, or in some cases, all, of mankind.