(Image by Nerissa’s Ring used under CC 2.0 via)
Forty years ago this week, Louise Brown was born in Oldham, England, the first human ever conceived by invitro fertilization. Since her birth, over 8 million people have been born thanks to invitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology. I can attest that if you have recently become a parent after a long journey trying to become one, it is particularly hard not to get choked up at hearing the recording of “Happy Birthday” sung to Baby Louise by her family and friends back in 1978.
And yet. Brown’s parents and the doctors who helped them become parents got hate mail and death threats. The hospital received a bomb scare. Brown’s father had to arrive under police protection. To this day Brown reports she is trolled online.
Advances in reproductive technology since Brown’s birth have helped create families for people facing infertility and deadly heritable diseases, single women, and same-sex couples. All such people are targeted regularly by various political groups—some vicious, some peaceful—who deem them “unnatural.” Yet no one on earth could tell the difference between a person who was conceived via IVF and a person who was conceived via sexual intercourse by meeting them.
As examined previously on the blog, adoptive families also have a long history of facing down those with horrific ideas about nature involving the importance of bloodlines and, as one commenter to The Atlantic put it, “inferior genetic stock.” Social and medical interventions in making families are indeed complex and merit nuanced discussions. But the vitriol involved in such discussions just goes to show that there are too many out there who can’t handle the idea of families unlike their own.
Painting On Scars 