Thirty years ago Friday, Louise Brown came into the world amid alarmist predictions that her birth would end sex. Jeremiahs such as writer Jeremy Rifkin wailed that in-vitro ("under glass") fertilization would harm the future Louise. Bioethicist Leon Kass then warned that in-vitro fertilization (IVF), by sundering the bonds between the act of sex and conception, would damage families.
Because of such fears, when Louise's parents walked down the streets of their English town in 1978, their neighbors fled, expecting something scaly or monstrous to be in the baby carriage. When they saw a normal baby, their fears disappeared. "IVF is just helping nature along a bit," Louise's father told them, correctly.
Since then, assisted reproduction has helped along hundreds of thousands of American babies. According to 2005 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, assisted reproduction helped create more than 50,000 American babies that year alone.
The Vatican perversely persists in condemning IVF, but it is hard to see the wisdom -- or any sense of compassion -- behind that thinking. Perhaps no children in history have been so wanted.
Of course, things aren't perfect. Children conceived through IVF have a slightly elevated rate of rare birth defects. It is still not clear why; it could be because of the older age of the eggs and sperm of the parents. But 99% of IVF kids, just like Louise Brown, are born healthy.
Although infertility clinics advertise great rates of success, real figures often disappoint. Few states require insurance companies to cover IVF, and the costs run about $8,000 or more for each attempt. Most couples try two or three times but end in failure. In fact, CDC statistics show that only about 25% to 30% of couples using IVF take home a baby, and if the woman is older than 35, the likelihood is worse.
So physicians have looked for new approaches. The next best tool is using eggs of young women. Such eggs, fertilized by sperm from the older man, create an embryo that can be gestated by the older woman and has a genetic connection to the father. For women over 40, this procedure dramatically increases their chances.
New medical -- especially fertility -- techniques are often reported in sky-is-falling prose. In 1969, Warren Kornberg, editor of Science News, wrote that ethical questions about assisted reproduction, cloning and human genetics outweighed ethical questions raised by atomic bombs. Whether it is with sperm donations from geniuses, egg donation, babies from thawed eggs, babies from frozen embryos or a baby from a medically twinned embryo, alarmists always predict that the next new technique will take us down the dreaded slippery slope.
