Oh, Fournayverse, I've MISSED You!
I was poking through some old stuff, and found a snippet from Hostile Takeover. Which I'd given up on in frustration ages ago, but I think if I had to choose a world to live in, it would be Janice Fournay's world.
Marriage is a contract with an option to renew; the gender or number of partners is nobody's business outside of the contract. They have two sets of gender-free pronouns; one for unknown gender, and another for beyond gender. Birth control is good enough that while abortion is legal, it's only necessary in the rare cases when a defect in the fetus can't be fixed.
It's not a utopia, by any means; people who are on welfare are legally considered minors and wards of the state, and global warming wasn't stopped (though improved technology and interstellar travel have helped ease the problem from the latter.)
But in comparison to the Fantasy worlds, high-tech wins every time.
Marriage is a contract with an option to renew; the gender or number of partners is nobody's business outside of the contract. They have two sets of gender-free pronouns; one for unknown gender, and another for beyond gender. Birth control is good enough that while abortion is legal, it's only necessary in the rare cases when a defect in the fetus can't be fixed.
It's not a utopia, by any means; people who are on welfare are legally considered minors and wards of the state, and global warming wasn't stopped (though improved technology and interstellar travel have helped ease the problem from the latter.)
But in comparison to the Fantasy worlds, high-tech wins every time.