Setting the ethic

Abstract

On 25 July 1978, in England, the world’s first ‘test-tube’ baby, Louise Brown, was born to Lesley and John Brown. The birth marked the realisation by a research scientist, Robert Edwards, and his colleague, gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, that fertilisation of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm which took place outside the female body and in a laboratory dish could be placed back into the woman’s body and develop to term. The first live birth from ‘test tube’ fertilisation, or what scientists call in vitro fertilisation or IVF, came after years of experimentation: experimentation which included removing eggs from women’s bodies, growing the eggs under laboratory conditions, and eventually entailed inserting the fertilised eggs into women’s wombs in the hope that pregnancy would result.