Exactly 40 years ago on Wednesday, around the time when a 100-page issue of PEOPLE magazine featured an ad for “enriched flavor” cigarettes and a cover story on the return ofStar Wars, Louise Brown was born.
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For her 40th birthday on Wednesday,Brown sat down with TIMEand reflected on the media circus surrounding her historic arrival, and the public criticism at the time of her parents, Lesley and John, for allowingdoctors to film thecaesarean sectionbirth.
Brown tells TIME that the birth needed to be public, to prove that the masterminds behind IVF, British scientist Robert Edwards and his gynecologist colleague Patrick Steptoe, had in fact found a way to conceive life outside of the human body.
“My parents didn’t have a choice about making it public,” Brown says. “If they didn’t, they would have had people asking ‘Why can’t we see her? What’s wrong with her?’
“Had there been anything at all wrong with me, it would have been the end of IVF,” she adds.
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Brown says that, though her late mother was a private person, Lesley ultimately had no regrets about the experience. “She would have done anything” for Steptoe and Edwards, Brown explains, because she was so grateful.
“Not long before mum passed away, she said that without IVF she wouldn’t have anybody left in the world,” Brown continues. “Even up to her last days she was proud of who she was and what she did.”
Today, Brown lives a “very normal life” in southwestern England, where she works for a freight company and lives with her husband and two sons, who were naturally conceived.
“Dear Mrs. Brown, Just a short note to let you know that the early results on your blood and urine samples are very encouraging, and indicate that you might be in early pregnancy. So please take things quietly — no skiing, climbing or anything too strenuous including Xmas shopping!,”a letter from Dr. Edwardsreads.
The collection also includes cards sent from well-wishers and women struggling to conceive, BBC reported.
Steve Van Wie, a 32-year-old Navy pilot, and his wife Alyce, 30, spoke to PEOPLE magazine in 1978 about the sense of hopelessness they felt before Brown’s IVF birth, as they struggled to conceive.
The procedure was also controversial at the time — subject to debates about the ethics of “human-life experimentation.”
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Brown’s birth changed the trajectory of fertility treatment in the United States and beyond.
“Now I tell a woman not to let anyone talk her into a hysterectomy because her tubes are diseased,” Soupart’s partner, Nashville gynecologist James Daniell, told PEOPLE in 1978. “I say, ‘Hang on — there’s some research going on right now which could solve your problem.’ ”
“That’s1984, George Orwell. We feel this is no more foreign than walking around with a stainless steel hip joint or a Dacron heart valve,” Dennis Grills, a chemical engineer at the time, told PEOPLE.
Brown tells TIME that now, 40 years later, people’s reactions to her are mostly positive.
source: people.com
