FERTILE GROUND

Since its introduction, more than eight million children have been born through IVF. We look at what the modern fertility landscape looks like in New Zealand and what’s yet to come

- MARIA HOYLE

Test tube babies. It was a startling term when the world first heard it – conjuring up visions of wee humans growing inside cylinders. Some people weren’t just startled, but outraged. What physiologist Robert Geoffrey Edwards and obstetrician Patrick Steptoe were working towards in the late 1960s – the fertilisation of an egg outside of a woman’s body – was deemed ‘unnatural’, science meddling in God’s work. One British magazine, Nova, said test tube babies were the biggest threat since the atom bomb.

And then it happened. The ‘meddling scientists’ produced a healthy baby.

Lesley Brown had suffered years of infertility before undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), where an egg was removed from one of her ovaries and combined in a lab dish with her husband’s sperm to form an embryo. This was transferred to her uterus a few days later.

On July 25, 1978 she delivered a little girl, Louise, at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. Louise was the first IVF baby in history – and the birth of hope for millions of women and couples around the globe.

IVF IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand was in the first wave of countries to implement IVF. Just five years after Louise was born, Dr Freddie Graham started the first IVF clinic at National Women’s Hospital in Auckland’s Greenlane. Four years later, Dr Graham and Dr Richard Fisher set up the country’s first private IVF clinic, Fertility Associates, from a house in Remuera. And today, they remain right on top of new developments.

“We’ve had it all, pretty much, all along. We like to be fast followers from a technology standpoint,” says Dr Dean Morbeck, Scientific Director at Fertility Associates, which last year celebrated its 20,000th birth.