There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the left: The state’s overwhelmingly Republican government took just weeks to pass a law to shield fertility clinics from liability when embryos are damaged or destroyed.

As a cultural question, it seemed the fight over I.V.F. was over before it began. In May, 82 percent of Americans polled by Gallup said they believe I.V.F. is morally acceptable. In response to public pressure, Donald Trump recently promised to defend I.V.F. with federal protections and even a theoretical mandate that health insurance pay for it.

This wasn’t inevitable. A generation ago, bioethicists fought over whether assisted reproductive technology would be normalized or made taboo. Now there’s strong public consensus that it should be not only tolerated but also celebrated.

But this may be a temporary lull. With major technological advances in childbearing on the horizon, what was once hypothetical is becoming plausible, setting the stage for a new and potentially tumultuous shift in the cultural mood about assisted reproduction.

Consider in vitro gametogenesis, or I.V.G., a technology under development that would allow the creation of eggs or sperm from ordinary body tissue, like skin cells. Men could become genetic mothers, women could be fathers, and people could be the offspring of one, three, four or any number of parents.

The first baby born via I.V.G. is most likely still a ways off — one researcher predicts it will be five to 10 years until the first fertilization attempt, although timelines for new biotech are often optimistic. But the bioethicist Henry Greely, noting the benefits of allowing same-sex couples to have genetic offspring and I.V.F. parents to pick the most genetically desirable of dozens or even hundreds of embryos, predicts that eventually a vast majority of pregnancies in the United States may arise from this kind of technology. Debora L. Spar, writing about I.V.G. for Times Opinion in 2020, echoes the view that such advances seem inevitable: “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.”