American Experience

Doris Del-Zio: He said, “I’m so sorry, Doris.” He said, “I can’t believe they did this.” And I said, “Who did what?” He said, “You don’t know?” And I said, “No. What are you talking about?” He said, “Dr. Vande Wiele destroyed the specimens.” And I said, “No! No, it could- it couldn’t- it- they couldn’t.” And I just lay there all night. And I couldn’t sleep. And I’m just laying there and crying. And early the next morning before daybreak, the door opened and Dr. Sweeney walked in. And he came over and he just held me, and just let me cry. That was the end of my—my dream. And it was a beginning of a nightmare.

Narrator: Back home in Florida, Doris Del-Zio could not let go of the past.

John Del-Zio: She was aloof, didn’t want to even have anything to do sexually, you know. And for a long period of time, she was affected in that way. She felt that she wasn’t a woman anymore.

Narrator: Then, John received a call from Landrum Shettles.

John Del-Zio: And Dr. Shettles explained to me that if we don’t do something to show that we had opposed the actions of Dr. Vande Wiele, then perhaps experimentation on procedures like this could not go on in the United States in the future.

Doris Del-Zio: And I was really upset about this at this point, because I didn’t want to go to a lawsuit. I said, “John, I can’t face it.” And he said, “We have a lawsuit.” But they couldn’t do it without me.

Narrator: The Del-Zios sued Columbia Presbyterian for a million and a half dollars, accusing Raymond Vande Wiele of inflicting severe mental pain and anguish. The progress of IVF in America was about to shift from the lab to the courtroom.

In England, Edwards and Steptoe were transferring fertilized eggs back into the mother’s body. But, the embryos wouldn’t take. One, two, 10, a hundred transfers — and no pregnancies.

Dr. Howard Jones, Fertility Expert: The problem was many times you changed two or three things, and then if you got a little inkling that something was working, you weren’t sure which one it was. So that it became a very troublesome trial-and-error sort of thing to get all these little technical details right.

Narrator: For nearly a decade, the pair persevered without government funding. Then in November 1977, they achieved a successful pregnancy for a factory worker named Lesley Brown. The fate of IVF would rest on the health of this baby.

While the world waited for the arrival of the first test tube baby, the Del-Zios’s lawsuit finally came to trial.

Doris Del-Zio: I was stunned. The whole street was closed off. There were TV trucks and cameras all over the place. There were people running after me. I didn’t know where they were coming from. It was like a mob scene. And they were all running at me with-with microphones. The court was completely packed with people from all over the world: from South America, from China, from Japan. I couldn’t believe it! I could not believe it. I sat there completely stunned.

Narrator: The press dubbed the Del-Zio case the “test-tube baby death trial.”

Reporter (archival): “How are you feeling?”

Doris (archival): “Nervous and Hopeful.”

Reporter (archival): “The Defense — the defense is saying that this procedure would have endangered your life. Do you agree with that?”

Attorney (archival): “No comment.”

Doris (archival): “No comment. I’m sorry.”

Attorney (archival): “Dr. Shettles has no comment.”

Shettles (archival): “No comment.”

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: The Del Zios said that something had been done to them by Raymond Vande Wiele and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. And the defense chose instead to put on trial Landrum Shettles …

Reporter (archival): “Doctor, how do you feel about the baby?”

Shettles’ Attorney (archival): “We have no opinion on the matter. Thank you.”

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: He was presented as a once promising scientist who couldn’t do his work anymore, who was taking shortcuts, and who was so inept that he couldn’t possibly have been actually growing an embryo in there.

Reporter (archival): “The Defense claims the procedure was a Model T operation. How do you defend your handling of it?”

Dr. William Sweeney (archival): “Well, I think that Mr. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. I can’t compare the Spirit of St. Louise with a 707, but he got to Paris. Now, if Mr. Lindbergh, sitting out there in Long Island, if his airplane had been destroyed before he took off, he couldn’t have gotten to Paris. That’s exactly what happened to us. We had an airplane sitting up there, ready to fly to Paris, and somebody destroyed it.”

Narrator: Once the trial began, Vande Wiele’s attorneys called Doris to the stand. For the next three days, she was grilled by a battery of lawyers.

John Del-Zio: They’re defending Columbia, the giant. And here we were, defending me and Doris. It was like David and Goliath.

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: And at one point, one of the lawyers says, “Why did you even file this lawsuit?” She said, “I didn’t want this to happen again.” And he said, “You mean, you-you didn’t want to allow the kind of rash experimentation that Landrum Shettles did?” Which was of course the defense-you know, this was all rash experimentation. And she said, “No. I didn’t want anyone else to have a Dr. Vande Wiele kill their baby.”

John Del-Zio: “You know, you killed my baby. The- her response all the time was, “That was going to be my baby and you killed my baby.”

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: And there was sort of a hush in the courtroom, and-and the lawyer said, “You don’t mean that. You didn’t think that was a baby.” And she said, “Yes! It was. He killed my baby.”

Doris Del-Zio: To this day, it was my baby. It’ll always be my baby. I don’t know which baby it was, but it was my baby.

Narrator: On July 25, 1978, nine days into the trial, the drama in the courtroom was overshadowed by events in England.

David Brinkley (archival): “Good evening. The first baby ever conceived outside the mother’s body was born in England. The so-called “test tube baby,” born by cesarean section. It is a girl, in excellent health. A beautiful, normal baby, the doctors said. And they said this may open the way for some, though not all, women who cannot have children otherwise.”

Narrator: With the birth of Louise Joy Brown, Edwards and Steptoe had pried open the mystery of human reproduction that had eluded Landrum Shettles.

Doris Del-Zio (archival): “I guess I’ll always wish that was my baby. I’ll always want my child. And it does hurt a little bit to know that I’ll never be able to have a baby. But it can’t take away from the joy I feel for Mrs. Brown today.”

John Del-Zio (archival): “We’re overjoyed- overjoyed for Mrs. Brown of course, and for science, which is what we’re talking about mostly now.”

John Del-Zio: I was very angry. I says, “We didn’t- we’re not the first in this country to do it,” because I was thinking in terms of the United States being the first to do something like this. And I was angry at first, and I said, “Well, I hope that this will show the jury that it’s possible, that we certainly can win this case now.”