Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

so many dissenters opposed to impregnating a woman using sperm that was not her husband’s that he kept his work secret until his death, and it was only revealed in 1909. In fact, the obituary for him, printed in the New York Times on 6 January 1897, made no mention of his innovations in this field. Instead, he was remembered as the surgeon who performed the autopsy of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined ‘Siamese twins’ who had been exhibited in Victorian freak shows nearly seventy years earlier.

A contemporary of Pancoast’s working in Austria, Professor Leopold Schenck, decided to go one better. In a Petri dish, he mixed together the sperm and egg of rabbits in an attempt at developing a rabbit embryo – something close to in vitro fertilization proper. But Schenck never succeeded in making bunnies, let alone babies. His clinic instead became renowned for a different speciality: that he could influence the sex of a baby, as its parents desired. And for this, he was in great demand. So much so that in 1898, a visiting American doctor barely gained entrance to Schenck’s Parisian surgery. On a trip to Paris, Dr Victor Neesen, who was visiting from Brooklyn, noted, ‘When I called at Dr Schenck’s house I found the street blocked with carriages of all descriptions. A group of well-dressed people stood on the stoop of the house, waiting to be admitted. The anterooms were crowded to suffocation with visitors, most of them women, richly attired and genteel looking, all waiting to consult the professor.’

Though there were those who objected on moral grounds, there was evidently quite a strong appetite for all sorts of reproductive manipulation. As long as it happened inside the body, and not in a test tube.

Not surprisingly then, there was huge public interest in the first IVF baby. Before the birth of Louise Joy Brown was announced in the summer of 1978, the Oldham and District General Hospital enlisted a guard dog as backup to its usual entourage of security guards, to ensure that mum and baby could avoid the paparazzi and get some much-needed rest. Still, journalists besieged the hospital’s maternity unit. It was suspected that the tabloids may have even faked a bomb scare, in efforts to snap a photo of an exhausted Lesley Brown as she left the building.

There had been a long wait for the child that many referred to as ‘our’ baby. The animal research into the potential for IVF had been encouraging, but there were fears that the process would not work in humans, or that terrible abnormalities would result. When Lesley and John Brown arrived in the office of Dr Patrick Steptoe at Oldham General Hospital outside of Manchester, they had nearly given up hope. Steptoe and the Cambridge physiologist Robert Edwards had been investigating options for fertilizing eggs outside the womb since the mid-1960s, but the eighty pregnancies they had managed had only lasted a few weeks before spontaneously aborting. After extracting an egg from Lesley and fertilizing it with John’s sperm, they watched it divide into more cells – and they took a gamble. Rather than waiting four or five days, as they had in the past, they injected the fertilized egg into Lesley’s womb two days later. The egg attached itself to the uterus wall without any difficulties.

Once news of the pregnancy leaked to the media, Lesley was forced into hiding. The press were chasing her all over Bristol, where she lived, and Edwards and Steptoe were concerned that she might lose the baby from the stress. Eventually, Steptoe drove Lesley to his mother’s house in Lincoln. For the rest of the pregnancy, the press could not uncover where she was.

For weeks, things seemed to go well. Then, near to her due date, Lesley’s blood pressure spiked. The doctors chose to deliver the baby early, rather than risk complications from natural labour. ‘There were many times in the last ten years when we wondered if we would ever see that baby,’ one of the team of doctors who had been working with Steptoe and Edwards on IVF later told the BBC. On the night of Louise’s delivery, there was a buzz in the air. Some of the medical staff had even drawn lots to be present at the history-making birth.

Louise may have been the first ‘superbabe’, but she was not to be the only one – even as she was born, there were reports of other mothers who were already pregnant using the new technology. By 1979, two more ‘test tube’ babies were born in the UK. The next year, Australia greeted its first IVF birth, with the United States matching this feat the year after that. Between 1978 and 1999, fifty thousand IVF babies were born in the UK, and more than four million worldwide. Each year, around eleven thousand IVF babies are now born in the UK, and around forty thousand in the US.

It may seem strange, but the world’s first IVF baby was also a spur to much ideological controversy. As with some views about human cloning today, many then (as some still do now) felt that creating life ‘in a test tube’ was unnatural; they believed that conception was supposed to happen through biological sex – and sex between married partners, to be quite precise. Among those opposing IVF was the Catholic Church. ‘The fact that science now has the ability to alter this does not mean that, morally speaking, it has the right to do so,’ the general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops told the Washington Post. But reaction was mixed, and the Church’s sentiment was not wholly embraced by the public. A Gallup poll taken shortly after Louise’s birth attested that sixty percent of people favoured the new technology, because it would make children