Snack 75: Happy Birthday Louise Brown!

The Whole Pineapple

July 25, 1978 was a great day, and not just because July 25 is Ruby’s birthday. This particular day in 1978, the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born!

IVF is a lot different now than it was then — a lot was learned on the way to this first successful human pregnancy, and a lot has been learned since. In this snack, Ruby and Anne are talking about the research and experimentation that got us where we are now.

One of the biggest changes (and dare we say, improvements) from the experience of Lesley and Peter Brown is how much less invasive (physically and frankly, of the Brown family’s privacy) the process is now than it was then.

Early hurdles included getting past people’s notions of whether or not IVF was ethical. And IVF cycles were so much more involved, including blood draws every four hours. Egg retrieval was a surgical process back then, it involved a single egg, and it was much more often unsuccessful. Transfers were done in the middle of the night until one didn’t and it worked out fine, and that was (thankfully) abandoned.

The fact that Louise Brown was later able to conceive without medical intervention helped allay fears that IVF would create a generation of people unable to reproduce on their own.

So Happy Birthday, Louise Brown, and thank you, Lesley and Peter Brown and Elizabeth Carr (first IVF baby in the US) for going through so much to get us where we are today.

Learn more about All Things Fertility at our website: thewholepineapple.com!