By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG (NY Times) December 29, 2012
If you do something revolutionary but you don’t realize it, are you still courageous? For Lesley Brown, the woman who gave birth to the world’s first test-tube baby, the bravery was incidental.
At age 16, Lesley met John Brown, a 21-year-old truck driver, in a cafe near the docks in Bristol, England. She was shunted among relatives most of her life and ran off with John almost on impulse. They eventually settled down, and Lesley began yearning for a child. It was a cold, wet day in November 1976 when Lesley and John made their way to the fertility clinic in the north of England run by the gynecologist Patrick Steptoe. Lesley, who was 29, had surgery six years earlier on her blocked fallopian tubes, but it didn’t work. On their way to Steptoe’s clinic, the Browns got lost on the winding streets of Manchester, too overwhelmed to ask directions. They were too overwhelmed to ask much of Steptoe either, just nodding when he explained that he could help them have a baby through what he called an implant. They thought that sounded reasonable. They also thought it sounded routine.
A year later, preparations for the “implant” were finally in place. First Steptoe used a special laparoscope to extract one of Lesley’s eggs. Then his partner, the biologist Robert Edwards, put the egg in a petri dish with John’s sperm. The culture grew into an embryo and, after two and a half days, Steptoe implanted it into Lesley’s uterus. Six weeks later, the pregnancy test came back. Positive.
Lesley was thrilled. She was a bit surprised, though, by Steptoe’s insistence that she keep the origins of her pregnancy secret. Not until the spring morning when John rushed home with a few tabloid papers under his arm, their headlines blaring news about an anonymous woman’s impending “miracle birth,” did she understand why: she was the first woman ever to become pregnant this way.
It’s hard to remember now, after the birth of more than four million babies through in vitro fertilization, how transgressive the procedure was in Lesley Brown’s day. Even serious scientists believed there was a risk of creating a chromosomal monster. Brown developed high blood pressure in her eighth month, and the baby was seeming small for its gestational age. Steptoe, aware that a bad outcome could set I.V.F. technology back for decades, admitted Brown to a hospital — under an assumed name, Rita Ferguson — so he could monitor her closely. (The burden of the medical expenses was eased when the Browns sold exclusive rights to their story to The Daily Mail.) But even though Steptoe went to the trouble of forging Brown’s records and keeping his real notes in his pocket diary, word about Rita Ferguson’s true identity leaked out, and an international birth watch began. Reporters and photographers hovered around the corridors dressed as plumbers, boilermakers, window cleaners and priests. Everyone wanted to get a glimpse of the woman with the test-tube pregnancy.
Louise Joy Brown was born Tuesday, July 25, 1978, by Caesarean section, the “Baby of the Century,” pink and round and perfectly normal. For a while, the press kept track of each new I.V.F. birth: one more reported before the end of 1978; four by the middle of 1980; the first in the United States at the end of 1981. In 1982, Lesley gave birth to another daughter, Natalie; she was the world’s 40th test-tube baby. And then people stopped counting. I.V.F. had moved almost imperceptibly in the public mind from unethical to frightening to just a bit unusual — and then, finally, to something so ordinary it wasn’t even noticed anymore.
Lesley died in June from complications of a gallbladder infection. By then Louise was a mother herself, as was her younger sister, Natalie. Both became pregnant the old-fashioned way.