In 1978, the pioneering work of a British medical team brought Louise Joy Brown into the world... and that story is now a Netflix film starring Kiwi actor Thomasin McKenzie.
When Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, was about to be born
I was the first IVF baby – if anything had gone wrong, the world would look different now
By Francesca Steele
Daily Telegraph UK·
8 mins to read
In 1978, Louise Brown became the first IVF baby. Decades later, she reflects on a life shaped by groundbreaking science. Photo / Neil Mockford, Getty Images
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One referenced the baby hatcheries in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Another assured readers that baby Brown had telepathic powers. The Browns received hate mail: someone from America sent a plastic test tube covered in fake blood with a fake foetus inside it, and a note saying they were coming to find them.
“If anything at all had been wrong with me, if I’d been born with a cleft palate, say, I think it would have really set the whole thing back,” Louise muses. “Luckily, they couldn’t find anything at all. I was totally healthy, totally normal.”
A new film Joy, directed by Sex Education’s Ben Taylor, charts the advent of Louise’s birth: the painstaking work of two doctors, Patrick Steptoe and Bob Edwards (played by Bill Nighy and James Norton), alongside their assistant Jean Purdy (Kiwi actor Thomasin McKenzie), to make IVF work for the very first time in humans, extracting an egg from the woman, putting it into a petri dish with a man’s sperm sample, and then implanting fertilised embryos back into the woman for a regular pregnancy.
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There were 101 failed IVF attempts before Lesley and John Brown had Louise, and the work attracted global controversy, hampering funding efforts and filling column inches.
There have been around 12 million babies born by in vitro fertilisation around the world since that day, but it was far from a sure thing at the time.
But what’s extraordinary about the story of Louise is not just how precarious her existence is but also just how very normal most of her life has been. Louise now lives in Bristol with her two sons and husband. She works in a bakery during the week, and describes watching the film as “very emotional, brilliant… but also a bit weird. Look, I’m a very normal person most of the time, so going on a red carpet, meeting celebrities, watching my birth on screen. Surreal.”
Louise’s parents were “ordinary, working-class people”. John was a truck driver and Lesley worked on local farms. They had come from broken homes and difficult backgrounds. Lesley’s mother was young and largely absent and her father had walked out on them, so she had been brought up mainly by her grandmother, who found her difficult and wayward.
John’s mother had died when he was 10, and like Lesley’s, his family had neither money nor stability. When John and Lesley first met they ran away from home and slept in abandoned railway carriages in Bristol until they were evicted. Eventually they cobbled enough money together to rent a room, and six years after meeting got married.
“Actually, I think that’s partly why they were accepted for the programme. Patrick and Bob really just wanted to help regular people have babies. And then everything just seemed to line up for Mum and Dad.
“The experiment hadn’t worked for so many but it worked for Mum first time. Mum also had to have an operation on her fallopian tubes first and they couldn’t afford it, but right before, my dad won £500 on the football pools. I think it was meant to be.”
Controversy plagued the project from the start. Newspapers discussed the prospect of “Frankenbabies” born with deformities, religious leaders lambasted scientists for “playing God” and the Medical Research Council rejected funding throughout the 1970s on ethical grounds. Steptoe and Edwards (who would later suggest the middle name “Joy”) used what little private funding they could garner to conduct the whole thing out of a dilapidated lab in Oldham.
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Four years after Louise, her sister Natalie arrived, the 40th IVF baby, also completely healthy. It was good to have someone to play with but also to share the media burden with, Louise says. By that stage, she had been taken all around the world on press tours, from Japan to America. “Mum was just so grateful to Patrick and Bob, she wanted to give back, and she knew that showing the world I was “normal” was the way to do that. Dad did most of the talking.”
The rest of the time they were just a regular happy family, watching Home and Away, going shopping, eating roasts on a Sunday.
Louise disliked the media attention too at points. “Now I enjoy talking about it, but when I was 14 I hated it. That’s when I realised what a big deal it was. People in Australia knew my name, and I didn’t know theirs. It was a lot, and I just wanted to fit in.
“But to be honest, people weren’t that horrible. Sometimes kids at school would joke about ‘how did I get out of the test tube?’ Her parents first showed her the official video of her birth when she was just 4. She was due to start school and her parents were worried someone would tell her about the unusual circumstances of her birth.
So, they showed her the film and explained. “Yeah, a C-section when you’re 4 is a bit gruesome,” she laughs.
In any case, she became a dab hand at responding to reporters. There’s a TV interview when she was 10 in which she authoritatively refers to “the dish thingy” her parents’ egg and sperm were mixed in. Journalists asked her from her early teens if she would be happy to use IVF.
“Obviously I wasn’t thinking about it then, but yes, I absolutely would have.” In the end she didn’t have to think about it: her two children – Cameron and Aiden – were conceived naturally (Edwards, who has attended her wedding, was one of the first people she told when she discovered she was pregnant) and her sister was actually the first IVF baby to conceive naturally: another milestone proving that IVF children are “normal”.
IVF may now be broadly accepted (although it’s still fairly precarious: the percentage of successful IVF treatments is still just 25 per cent for women aged 35, the average age of women starting the process) but plenty of debates rage on, from the ethics of freezing embryos or choosing a baby’s gender (which you can now do in Californian clinics), to differing global legislation on who can do IVF.
For example, in Germany male couples cannot seek IVF. President elect Donald Trump has vowed to make cost-free IVF available to all in the US, although policy details remain unclear.
And there is the matter of cost. In the UK, an NHS postcode lottery can make it very difficult to seek treatment. In Hertfordshire, women can only have one cycle, in Sussex, three.
Sixty-three per cent of IVF is now done privately, according to the HFEA, the UK regulator. Many women reluctantly go private; the average cost of a private IVF round is £5000 (NZ$10,750).
Rachel Mason, who co-created the story of the film with its writer, her husband Jack Thorne (the screenwriter who adapted Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for television), said: “I had seven rounds back-to-back; each failure was horrific.
I actually considered leaving Jack if it didn’t work, as the problem was with me. He was amazing but I just thought it was too hard. We were so lucky to be able to afford it and conceived our son on the final try; I really don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t worked.”
Mason is now involved in fertility support groups with the charity Fertility Network. “I see women who IVF has helped, and women still desperate to have babies. It’s very hard.”
Louise herself has travelled to many countries, from Brazil to Japan, to help highlight the benefits of IVF. What does she think about how politicised aspects of the procedure have become?
“Honestly who am I to say? If a 47-year-old woman wants to try for a baby that’s her choice. People have always asked me and my parents what we think, but they just wanted a baby. Personally, I think we’ve just got to trust the scientists. They’re helping people. They will take it as far as they need to.”
Joy is on Netflix from November 22
