‘Now She’s Just an Ordinary Baby’: The Birth of IVF in the British Press

Abstract

The birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), in England in 1978 attracted worldwide media attention. This article examines how the contemporary British news media framed this momentous event. Drawing on the example of the Daily Mail’s coverage, it focuses on the way in which the British press depicted Louise’s parents’ emotions, marital relationship and social class in a context of political and economic crisis and resurgent social conservatism. The British press framed the Browns as ordinary and respectable, noting their work ethic, family orientation and moral values. The article argues that the human-interest angle that the press used to represent this story created a dominant narrative in which IVF was simply a means of helping married heterosexual couples have babies and that this established a frame for subsequent depictions of IVF, as well as contributing to its rapid normalisation.

Six Days in Plastic: Potentiality, Normalization, and In Vitro Embryos in the Postgenomic Age

“…3 "Normality" and "normalization" is in many ways key to the global success of IVF, now the cornerstone technology of a multibillion-dollar fertility industry. Indeed, in the British press's coverage of Louise Brown's birth, the first "test tube baby" in 1978, the Brown's family normality was a key tenant of the media framing, thus setting up a dominant narrative of IVF stepping in to assist in conceiving children to ordinary folks, albeit in an extraordinary fashion (Dow 2019). Thompson (2005, 79-115) catalogues techniques of normalization in the fertility clinic, that is how "new material" is incorporated into preexisting grids of legibility.…”

Reconstructing Robert Edwards: biography and the history of reproduction

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