Making new families

With one in seven heterosexual couples struggling to conceive, there’s a good chance that any given church congregation in the global north contains someone seeking medical help to start their family. Indeed, there’s a good chance that this church already has children going to Sunday School, or adults sitting in the pews, who were conceived and born thanks to such techniques. 

Around the world, there are estimated to be over 10 million people alive thanks to assisted reproductive treatment (ART). Recent figures for the US suggest that 2.5% of live births are now assisted by in vitro fertilisation (IVF), one well-known type of ART.

Undergoing ARTs is physically gruelling for those donating eggs and trying to become pregnant, and fraught with emotional difficulty. Yet it is also a testament to science that can bring joy by creating families outside of conventional patterns.

The gospel stories of Jesus’s birth similarly up-end conventional ways of thinking about family lines. 

Luke’s gospel begins the genealogy of Jesus by stating that ‘He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph’. This implied misunderstanding is like a bomb under the family tree that follows, back from Joseph via King David to all the patriarchs. It is Jesus’s line … and at the same time it is not.

Even today, we insist on a direct bloodline to consider someone as being royal. But Jesus, says Luke, wasn’t Joseph’s son at all - he was begotten by God. Luke says: I’ll give you a human bloodline if you want it - but remember that God has no truck with conventional inheritance and all that it stands for.

After World War II, women wanted to continue making their families, even if their husbands had been killed or wounded. It didn’t matter to them where the genetic material came from; the family would still be real. They began to seek out donor insemination, slowly starting to change social norms about birth and family.

In the late 1960s, a team of British researchers - Robert Edwards, Jean Purdy and Patrick Steptoe - came to work together on a more complex reproductive challenge: creating a pregnancy from an externally fertilised egg. 

Historians have pointed to several factors that explain why the research should have happened where and when it did. They highlight a local scientific culture that valued innovation (a culture that can have cons as well as pros), and the facilitation that was provided by the National Health Service. There were also personal motivations at play. Edwards had previously been interested in more purely scientific questions, but shifted focus when he met Steptoe, who had a long-standing clinical practice with couples struggling to conceive.

At least 282 women offered themselves to the researchers to have eggs stimulated and removed, in a cycle of treatment that was demanding and unpleasant. 21 of them volunteered to go through four or even more rounds of the procedure.

By the early 1970s, the team was ready to try implanting embryos; and for years, they failed. It’s important to remember that these were not theoretical experiments. Each failure was a bitter disappointment to a real couple; and each couple’s grief was a step towards the hopes of others. 

Eventually, an eight-cell embryo, transplanted at midnight on 12 November 1977, began to grow and develop towards completion. On 25 July 1978 a baby was born in Oldham General Hospital near Manchester, England; her parents named her Louise Joy Brown.

Louise Brown beat the odds. Of around 100 implantations performed by the team, only five pregnancies were clinically confirmed, and of these only two live babies were born. That IVF research and treatment continued despite its lack of success is testament to media excitement about Brown’s birth, and to the eagerness of people, otherwise unable to have children, to pursue their hopes.

It’s not a straightforward story of happy endings.

Each cycle of IVF still has low odds of success. Access to the treatment is patchy in rich countries, and non-existent in poor ones. Some people argue that media focus on the treatment (and its unrepresentative focus on success-stories) increases the trauma of infertility. By the same token, it’s argued, such coverage prevents society from thinking constructively about other forms of nurture and fulfilment. Others have ethical unease about the use of embryos, or about the level of informed consent that Edwards, Purdy and Steptoe obtained from their participants.

All of these concerns may have value. But at the heart of ARTs lie important advent themes: the fierce desire for new life; the assent of women to play a part in hope; and the creation of new families that reach beyond patriarchal constraints. 

Discussion Questions

• ARTs bring hope to many people who want to be parents. Have you ever experienced intense hope in your life?
• The story focuses on unconventional families and family-lines. Do we still place an emphasis on ‘proper’ family lines in modern society? Where else do we see unconventional ones in the Bible?
• Some people criticise the media for its focus on successful IVF stories because these can stop people from finding fulfilment through other forms of nurture and kinship. What other relationships allow us to fulfil parental and familial gifts?

Further reading

• Reproductive BioMedicine Online: Special issue: 40th Anniversary of IVF (Last update 17 January 2019) https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/10J76S2B3MX
• Lauren Kassell, Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming (eds), Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Netflix will release on the 22nd November 2024 - Joy - miniseries dramatising the IVF breakthrough and the birth of Louise Joy Brown.