Assisted reproduction
No IVF please, we’re British
(sz) “Baby of the century” ran the front-page headline of the Daily Express on July 11th, 1978. The paper promised the story of Lesley Brown, who was barricaded inside Oldham and District General Hospital, near Manchester, waiting to give birth. The world’s press was camped outside; the front doors locked and staff forced to sneak in and out via a side entrance. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, the obstetrician and physiologist who had, nine months before, taken an egg from one of Mrs Brown’s ovaries under anaesthetic and fertilised it in vitro with her husband’s sperm, were in hiding. It had been, said Time magazine after Mrs Brown was delivered of a daughter on July 25th, “the most awaited birth in perhaps 2,000 years”.
Thirty years after Louise Brown was born, “test-tube babies” are commonplace. Around the world 3.5m have been born and at least 200,000 more join them each year. Yet infertile people in the country where it all began are among the least likely in the rich world to receive what is now a standard treatment for their condition. Just under 700 attempts at in vitro fertilisation (IVF) are carried out per million Britons each year, one of the lowest rates in Europe. The 11,262 IVF babies born in Britain in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, were just 1.6% of all births, compared with rates of 3-3.5% in the Nordic countries. more…
From: »The Economist«