By the summer of 1978, not one but two conception stories had made UK headlines that year. The bigger story was that of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”, who was conceived via in vitro fertilisation after her parents, Lesley and John, discovered that Lesley’s fallopian tubes were blocked and sought help from a team of doctors in Oldham. Though there had been some public hostility to the Brown pregnancy, once baby Louise was born that July, reassuringly healthy and “normal”, the UK press celebrated the feat of science. While it’s very easy to imagine that first procedure being framed as an unnatural, freakish intervention, IVF was instead heralded as an “all-British miracle”, as the Manchester Evening News put it.
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