Laid-back Louise was world’sfirsttesttubebaby
Notmanyofus celebrate our 40th birthdays as joyously as one lady will this week.
Louise Joy Brown, our first test tube baby, reaches that landmark after her most remarkable arrival on July 25, 1978.
The world’s first-ever IVF baby came into the world at Oldham & District General Hospital, weighing 5lb 12oz, and delivered by Caesarean section.
They only delivered her that way because her mother, Lesley, had toxaemia, or blood poisoning.
To the relief and delight of countless people around the globe, Patrick Steptoe, consultant in charge, explained: “All examinations showed that the baby is quite normal. The mother’s condition after delivery was also excellent.”
Mrs Brown, 29 at the time, had blocked fallopian tubes and had undergone IVF treatment.
The previous November, she’d had her egg and her husband John’s sperm implanted in her womb after being fertilised in a laboratory. Cambridge research physiologist Robert Edwards had helped gynaecologist Steptoe pioneer the technique.
With 20,000 women in a similar situation to
Mrs Brown, and with 5,000 having already applied for the amazing new treatment, there was going to be no shortage of interest in all of this.
It could become something even bigger, too, with Mr Edwards pointing out: “This work may be developed in other respects.
“It may include the reversal of sterilisation.” The Catholic Church raised objections, with Cardinal Gordon Gray, Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, saying: “I have grave misgivings about the possible implications and consequences for the future.”
Incredibly, when Louise blew out her candles on her 21st birthday, 300,000 women had conceived with the help of IVF. By the early 2000s that figure had risen to more than a million worldwide.
Steptoe and Edwards really did make millions of dreams come true.
Louise’s little sister, Natalie, would be born the same way – and in 1999 she became the first test tube baby to give birth naturally.
Louise was four before her parents told her about her unique, record-breaking, history-making birth, and showed her videos of her first moments in the hospital, scenes that people in every corner of the globe had already marvelled at.
It’s said that she has nevertheless lived a laid-back, unfussy life, and has never got carried away with all the fame and attention.
She came to think of the two geniuses who made it all possible, Steptoe and Edwards, as uncles.
They, like us, thought of her as an awesome miracle.