Louise Brown, First Test Tube Baby To Be A Mom
On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first successful “test-tube” baby was born in Great Britain. The 27-year-old who married former bank security officer Wesley Mullinder, 36, from Bristol is due to give birth in January, more than two years after she began trying to get pregnant. The former postal worker from Bristol said it was a “dream come true”.
The birth of Brown on July 25, 1978, with the help of British IVF pioneers Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, brought hope to millions of infertile couples around the world after a decade of research on finding ways to fertilise human eggs outside the body, including Louise’s sister, Natalie, 20.
Louise feared she may have trouble becoming pregnant as infertility problems often be can inherited. Two years after she married security officer Wesley Mullinder, however, the couple, who live on the outskirts of Bristol in south west England, are expecting their first baby, which was conceived naturally. “We are so excited about becoming parents, and I know Louise will make a fantastic mother,” added her husband.
“We are overjoyed that Louise is expecting,” said Mr Mullinder. “We are so excited about becoming parents, and I know that Louise will make a fantastic mother.
“We are already beginning to think about getting the house kiddie-proof.”
The birth was the result of 12 years of research by a British team, Dr. Robert Edwards and Dr. Patrick Steptoe, who pioneered in-vitro fertilization. The technology that made her conception outside of the womb possible was heralded as a triumph in medicine and science.
The IVF technique, invented jointly by Edwards and the late Steptoe, involved the successful removal of a single ripe egg from the ovary of Louise’s mother, and its fertilisation in a glass dish with sperm from her husband. The resulting embryo was implanted back into the mother’s body, and she became pregnant.
Steptoe died when Louise was 10, but Edwards was the guest of honour at her wedding in Bristol in 2004, where the former assistant for a shipping company now lives. After she married, Brown said, “We’d love to have children of our own one day and, hopefully, we won’t have to use IVF. We’ll just have to wait and see. When I was younger I used to want three or four (children), but now I don’t know.”
“I used to think I was special,” she said at the time. “I used to think about how I was conceived when I was 10 or 11. But I don’t think about it at all now that so many other babies have been born the same way.”
Brown’s parents Lesley and John Brown were from Bristol but unable to conceive for nine years. Lesley had blocked fallopian tubes. She was referred to Steptoe in 1976.
On Nov. 10, 1977, Lesley Brown underwent then very experimental in-vitro (“in glass”) fertilization. Such breakthroughs led to a dramatic increase in children born by assisted reproduction.
In some Scandinavian countries, between 2 and 3 per cent of the children born each year have been conceived by such means. Worldwide, about 100,000 children are born annually after IVF of human eggs and sperm in laboratory settings. It is estimated that about one million such children have been born since 1978.
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on Jul 12 2006. Filed under Women Health, Women Personality.
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