American Experience

Narrator: After a month-long trial, the jury found Raymond Vande Wiele guilty of wrongfully causing emotional distress, but awarded the Del-Zios only $50,000 in damages – a fraction of their request.

Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist: I think the court, when it tried to wrestle with the question of what to do, didn’t know how to compensate for a hypothetical. Maybe there had been an embryo made. Maybe that embryo could have become a baby. Maybe that baby would have been normal. That’s a lot of maybes. And courts don’t like to award a lot of money on the basis of a lot of maybes.

Narrator: Shettles never regained his reputation and the Del-Zios never had a baby. But the trial forced Americans to grapple with their conflicted attitudes toward in vitro fertilization.

Johnny Carson (archival, opening monologue): “How would you like to be the world’s first test tube baby? What do you do on Father’s day? Do you send a card to the Dupont Corporation? I understand that after the baby was conceived in the laboratory, a pair of beakers smoked a cigarette and stared at the ceiling!”

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: She was on the cover of every magazine and every newspaper, and she was called the “baby of the century.” And it was an incredible circus around the birth of Louise Brown, because people had been so sure that she was going to be a monster, that when she turned out to be just this chubby-cheeked, blonde newborn who was quite beautiful, there was so much relief.

Phil Donahue (archival): “We clearly have a beautiful, beautiful and normal baby. You couldn’t get in your home when you came home from the hospital with the baby, right?”

John Brown (archival): “That’s right, yes.”

Phil Donahue (archival): “Because of the press?”

John Brown (archival): “Press. People wanting to see Louise because everyone got the wrong impression.”

Phil Donahue (archival): “What was the wrong impression Mr. Brown?”

John Brown (archival): “Well when they say 'test tube baby,’ everybody had the impression that she was gonna be nine feet tall and 1/4 inch wide. You know, something kinda out of a comic strip sort of thing. And they were very very surprised when they seen her.”

Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist: Who knew whether the next ten babies were going to turn out to have birth defects and be stillborn and have all kinds of problems? Nobody. But the appearance of this clearly healthy, happy kid basically silenced the critics.

Narrator: In America, attitudes shifted quickly. Across the country, infertile couples began to clamor for in vitro fertilization. In response, critics of IVF stepped up pressure on Washington.

Lee Silver, Geneticist: The idea of IVF started to spread in 1980. 1980 is the year that Ronald Reagan became President, and one of Reagan’s constituencies was the conservative religious Republicans. And so Reagan made sure that there would be no federal funding for any research on human embryos.

Narrator: Politicians scrambled to placate both sides.

Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist: If it could move forward without federal involvement, I think most people in Congress and the state legislatures were ready to say, “God bless it. It’s off my desk.”

Lee Silver, Geneticist: It wasn’t that IVF was banned; it was just that federal funds couldn’t be used. So it’s a very clever political ploy in the United States. It would be done freely in private enterprise, but we weren’t going to use any government funds and so the government was being more ethical that way. And that’s the way the entire history of IVF began in the United States.

Narrator: IVF in America would start up again with two physicians on the verge of retirement. Drs. Howard and Georgeanna Jones were leading experts in reproductive medicine at Johns Hopkins. Even Robert Edwards had sought the couple’s advice. All that was behind them.

Dr. Howard Jones, Fertility Expert: Now, when Georgeanna and I had to retire, the question was: What do we do? Do we go fishing? We consulted our children. And we have three children, and they unanimously voted that we should go fishing.

Narrator: The Joneses were ready to settle into a quiet academic life in Norfolk, Virginia, when their plans were upended by the birth of Louise Brown.

Dr. Howard Jones, Fertility Expert: The reporter from the local newspaper came to our home on the day that Louise Brown had been born. While we were moving in, she interviewed us about this nice thing had happened. We gave her all sorts of good information about that, and then as she was leaving she said, “Could this be done in Norfolk?” And it sounded like a flip question, and I gave her a flip answer. I said, “Of course.” And she said, “What would it take?” And I said, “It would take some money.” And as a result of that, a former patient called up, and said, “I see by the paper you need some money. How much do you need?” And I had never been asked that question before, and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question since.

Narrator: The Joneses soon announced their plan to open an IVF clinic. Anti-abortion activists in Norfolk immediately rallied their forces to stop them.

Announcer (archival): “This is News Three.”

Reporter (archival): “Charles Dean is the President of Tidewater Chapter of the Virginia Society for Human Life. Dean claims that fertilized eggs have and will be destroyed by doctors in the clinic.”

Charles Dean (archival): “Basically, the manipulation in destruction of human beings — tiny human beings at their earliest stage is — has to be unacceptable to any civilized society.”

Reporter (archival): “Dr. Howard Jones who heads up the in vitro clinic says that doctors plan to re-implant all fertilized eggs, not destroy them. But fertilization, whether natural or in vitro, isn’t perfect he says, and in those cases, abortion will be offered as an alternative.”

Dr. Howard Jones, Fertility Expert(archival): “It seems to me that it would be unwise and indeed even malpractice not to offer these women the same opportunity that patients who are normally pregnant have.”

Narrator: Anti-abortion groups found it hard to fight a technology that enabled couples to have a baby. The momentum was now on the side of IVF.

Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist: If you get babies, and they’re the biological offspring of those couples, and those couples don’t have many other options, I think most Americans say “who cares.” Test tube baby technology is seen by almost every American as pro-life technology.

Narrator: On March 1, 1980 the first in vitro fertilization clinic in America opened its doors. Thousands of women flooded the Joneses with letters, phone calls, and telegrams begging for the procedure. In the two years following the birth of Louise Brown, there had been numerous attempts at IVF around the world, but only two more successes. The science of in vitro fertilization was still in its infancy.

Lucinda Veeck Gosden, Embryologist: In the beginning, the lab was a bit of a black box. We didn’t have a manual to follow. There hadn’t been a number of published papers to that point, showing us: Do this, push that, collect this, do that. We had to learn very much on our own through trial and error.

Narrator: To start, seven couples arrived in Norfolk from across the country. Following Robert Edward’s model, the Joneses began tracking the women’s menstrual cycles.

Dr. Howard Jones, Fertility Expert (archival): “They are all elevated over the normal and we know that the…”