The first IVF baby turns 30
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July 25th - 30 years ago from today, the first IVF baby was born in Britain. Louise Joy Brown was called the first “test tube baby”, a term that is today considered to be politically incorrect. We’ve come a long way in 30 years. Since then, millions of babies have been brought into this world using assisted reproduction technology (ART). Through ART, we have witnessed postmenopausal women delivering babies, young women earning bucks as “wombs for hire“, and very recently, the first “pregnant father” gives birth to his daughter.
Assisted reproduction has become a billion-dollar service industry. The question is, where does it go from here?
In its July 16 online issue, Nature magazine asked several IVF experts of their expectations for the next 30 years. And their answers range from the hopeful - total eradication of infertility, higher embryonic survival - to the scary - cloning and 100-year-old mommies.
So where is Louise Brown now? She can be seen in this BBC video clip. Louise tells of her life being always the attention of the media. As a child, she was also asked by total strangers bizarre questions like how she could fit in a test tube. Her mom tells about her ordeal of being chased by reporters during her pregnancy. Nowadays, IVF is a routine procedure nobody pays attention unless a celebrity is involved.
Louise conceived naturally and gave birth to her son Cameron who is now 18 months old.
Sources:
Nature 454, 260-262 (2008)
Fertility Treatment Center says...
It’s amazing how far we’ve come. More than 3 million babies have been born with the help of in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the IVF process has greatly improved within the last 30 years. Now, we are able to do frozen embryo transfers and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)–a ground-breaking technique used during IVF to test embryos for a variety of genetic disorders. We can also now significantly reduce the chances of multiple births with Day 4 Embryo Transfers. It’s quite a birthday celebration!