First IVF Baby Born: Louise Brown Enters the World

A five-pound, twelve-ounce baby delivered by planned caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital became the most consequential birth of the twentieth century. Louise Joy Brown was the first human being conceived outside a mother's body, and her arrival proved that in vitro fertilization could produce a healthy child after more than a decade of failed attempts, scientific ridicule, and ethical controversy. Physiologist Robert Edwards and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe had been collaborating on IVF since the late 1960s, pursuing an idea that most of the medical establishment considered impossible or immoral. Edwards had figured out how to fertilize a human egg in a laboratory dish by 1969, but the challenge of implanting the resulting embryo into a uterus and sustaining a pregnancy defeated them repeatedly. The pair were denied government funding by the Medical Research Council, which questioned both the science and the ethics, forcing them to rely on private donations. Lesley Brown, a thirty-year-old Bristol woman, had been trying to conceive for nine years. Blocked fallopian tubes made natural conception impossible. Steptoe retrieved a single egg from her ovary using a laparoscope, Edwards fertilized it with her husband John's sperm in a petri dish, and two and a half days later they transferred the embryo to her uterus. The pregnancy proceeded normally, though the team kept it secret for months to avoid media pressure. The birth triggered immediate ethical debate. Religious leaders condemned the procedure as tampering with creation. Bioethicists warned about the commodification of human reproduction. Headlines alternated between calling Louise a "miracle baby" and a "test-tube baby," a term Edwards despised. The Browns received hate mail alongside thousands of congratulatory letters. More than twelve million children have been born through IVF since 1978. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010, thirty-two years after the discovery he was told would never work.