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I was the world’s first IVF baby but one fear always haunted me


Louise Joy Brown in a silver gown on the London Film Festival red carpet

Louise Joy Brown made modern scientific history as the world’s first IVF baby (Picture: Getty)

Louise Joy Brown – the world’s first test-tube baby – has lived a perfectly normal life, all under the ‘intrusive’ media spotlight.

Louise, 46, was born on July 25, 1978 in Oldham General Hospital after a decade-long scientific and social struggle from in vitro fertilisation (IVF) pioneers – Jean Purdy, Dr Patrick Steptoe and Robert ‘Bob’ Edwards.

Over four decades later, and with two children of her own, the dramatic story of Louise’s history-making birth is finally being told to the world, where there are over 12,000,000 IVF babies alive today.

‘When I was born, it was the unknown. They didn’t know if I was going to be healthy. They didn’t know if there was going to be any abnormalities,’ she told Metro as Netflix’s new biopic Joy hits screen.

But the hypermedia focus on her and her family (exacerbated by the rampant opposition from more conservative circles) meant that she received hate mail up until ‘the first couple of years after [her] birth’.

Although the furor eventually died down, the press’ fascination with Louise did not.

Her birth, and the scientific pioneers behind it, changed the world (Picture: Getty)

From as young as the age of 14 she was being asked by strangers if she planned to use IVF to grow her own family, and the gravity of who she was fully sunk in.

‘In my teenage years I was a bit more freaked out about the fact that somebody over the other side of the world knew all about me and I knew nothing about them,’ she said.

‘When you’re a teenager and you want to do something I used to then stop and think, “oh, well, am I going to get into trouble? Is this going to be headline news?”

‘It didn’t really affect me because I’d say I was overall quite a good girl but there was always that thought in the back of my mind “oh, are the press going to be around? Are they going to catch me?”‘

And it’s not something she has been able to escape in adulthood either, recalling on incident when she was stalked by photographers outside her job at a nursery.

‘There was no relevance to why he was there or any story that was breaking. So it was quite intrusive,’ she added, although now she has learnt to ‘go with the flow of everything’ and is ‘not bothered’.

Her parents received hate mail the first few years after her birth (Picture: Ted Blackbrow/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)

If anything, she is immensely ‘proud’ of her legacy and what her birth signified for so many million so families around the world who were facing their own fertility problems.

The NHS assigns IVF to couples based on a case-by-case basis with the final decision made by local integrated care boards (ICBs) with criteria including age, health and any previous children.

But the system is far from perfect, it was only …read more

Source:: Metro

      

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