Lesley Brown, British mother of first in vitro baby, dies at 64

When Lesley Brown’s first child was born, there was no need to send out announcements. The news was blared on front pages around the world: “OUR MIRACLE,” “BABY OF THE CENTURY,” “IT’S A GIRL.”

On July 25, 1978, Mrs. Brown, a young woman from a working-class English town, gave birth to the first baby conceived outside the womb.

(Chris Radburn/AP) - In this 2008 photo British physiologist Robert Edwards, left, attends the 30th anniversary of the world's first baby born through in vitro fertilization. Lesley Brown, the mother, is at center, and Louise Joy Brown, her daughter, right, holds son Cameron.

Baby Louise Joy became a focus of international fascination as the first test-tube baby, produced through in vitro fertilization. The technique raised moral and medical alarms 34 years ago but is commonplace today because of the more than 4 million women who have followed in Mrs. Brown’s steps.

Mrs. Brown died June 6 in Bristol, England, of complications of a gallbladder infection, the New York Times reported. She was 64.

She and her truck driver husband, John, had struggled to conceive a baby for nine years until they met British biologist Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist. She had undergone a series of operations that failed to unblock her fallopian tubes, the cause of her inability to become pregnant.

The 30-year-old woman was otherwise healthy, making her a good candidate for the experimental procedures the two men had been developing for years. They had produced one pregnancy before Mrs. Brown’s, but it was ectopic, meaning the fertilized egg developed outside the womb and could not survive.

With the aid of a thin viewing tube called a laparoscope, Steptoe and Edwards harvested one of Mrs. Brown’s eggs and fertilized it in the laboratory using her husband’s sperm. They kept the fertilized egg alive in a glass dish containing a solution of special nutrients, and implanted it in Mrs. Brown’s uterus 2 ¹ / ₂ days later.

Her pregnancy proceeded normally — until word got out that conception had been anything but normal. Reporters from as far away as Japan descended on the Browns’ neighborhood and at their hospital in Oldham.

For the last month of her pregnancy, she took refuge in the hospital’s maternity ward, trying to avoid reporters and photographers who disguised themselves as janitors, boiler men and hospital administrators to snag a shot or interview with the first in vitro mother-to-be.

News coverage was filled with purloined details about her diet, her dress, her emotional state. Medical experts were quoted warning about possible abnormalities in any child born of such unorthodox means. Ethicists invoked Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” theorizing about the potential for abuse or misuse of the controversial new technique. Religious leaders said in vitro technology was not in God’s plan.

For Mrs. Brown, there was never any question that she would take Edwards’s and Steptoe’s help.

“When you’ve been through a lot of treatment over the years . . . then any chance you get that someone’s going to help you, you take it with both hands,” she told the Associated Press years later.

Baby Louise was delivered a few weeks early by Caesarean section because Mrs. Brown had developed toxemia, a disorder that can lead to stillbirth. The delivery proceeded uneventfully, ending with the most normal kind of drama: The 5-pound-12-ounce newborn “came out crying her head off . . . a beautiful, normal baby,” Steptoe told Time magazine, which heralded the event on its cover.

Four years later, in 1982, Mrs. Brown made history again with the birth of her second child. Daughter Natalie was the world’s 40th test-tube baby, and Mrs. Brown was the first woman to have two children through the in vitro method. In both instances, she became pregnant on her first try.

Mrs. Brown’s husband died in 2007. She is survived by her daughters and several grandchildren.

In 2010, Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for helping develop in vitro fertilization techniques. Steptoe died in 1988, and presumably would have shared the Nobel but the award is not given posthumously.

— Los Angeles Times