Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Foundations of Global Assisted Reproduction

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
IVF and Assisted Reproduction

  • 566 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter outlines the institutional means whereby assisted reproduction (AR) became established worldwide. It begins with an account of the foundations of the industry created by AR practitioners themselves, through the identification of new techniques and client groups, innovative professional meetings, new associations and journals, international peer training and cooperation with industry. It identifies public criticisms of AR, notably by fellow medical professionals and religiously based opponents. It describes nation-based attitudes to the new technology, including its symbolic significance as a marker of modernity, the potential role of genetic testing of embryos in public health, and the use of AR in relation to population policy. Throughout, the chapter draws attention to financing and news media, two key aspects of the development of the new industry.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Jean Cohen, Alan Trounson, Karen Dawson, Howard Jones, Johan Hazekamp, Karl-Gösta Nygren, and Lars Hamberger, ‘The Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, Human Reproduction Update 11, no. 5 (2005): 439–59, 440.

  2. 2.

    ‘Birth of the Blues’, Guardian Diary, Guardian (UK), 25 March, 1980.

  3. 3.

    Robert G. Edwards, ‘An Introduction to Bourn Hall: The Biomedical Background of Bourn Hall Clinic’, in Textbook of In Vitro Fertilization and Assisted Reproduction: The Bourn Hall Guide to Clinical and Laboratory Practice, 3rd ed., ed. Peter R. Brinsden (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 1–8, 6.

  4. 4.

    ‘Birth of the Blues’.

  5. 5.

    Edwards, ‘An Introduction to Bourn Hall’, 6.

  6. 6.

    ‘Test Tube Baby’, Guardian (UK), 24 June, 1980.

  7. 7.

    ‘Test Tube Clinic Opens’, Guardian (UK), 2 October, 1980.

  8. 8.

    Yulian Zhao, Paul Brezina, Chao-Chin Hsu, Jairo Garcia, Peter R. Brinsden, and Edward Wallach, ‘In Vitro Fertilization: Four Decades of Reflections and Promises’, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1810, no. 9 (2011): 843–52, 845.

  9. 9.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 450.

  10. 10.

    Christine Doyle, ‘Big Rush for “Test Tube” Babies’, Observer, 13 July, 1980.

  11. 11.

    Peter R. Brinsden, ‘Thirty Years of IVF: The Legacy of Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards’, Human Fertility 12, no. 3 (September 2009): 137–43, 139.

  12. 12.

    ‘Birth of the Blues’; Robert Edwards, ‘A Matter of Life 1. The Scientist’, Observer, 16 March, 1980; Patrick Steptoe, ‘Now, the Clinical Reality: A Matter of Life 2. The Doctor’, Observer, 23 March, 1980; Patrick Steptoe, ‘A Matter of Life 3. The Baby’, Observer, 30 March, 1980.

  13. 13.

    Philip McIntosh, ‘Scientist to Preach the Test Tube Baby Method’, Age (Melbourne), 11 March, 1981.

  14. 14.

    R. G. Edwards, ‘Test-Tube Babies, 1981’, Nature 293, no. 5830, 24 September (1981): 253–56, 253.

  15. 15.

    Ian Johnston, Alex Lopata, Andrew Speirs, Ian Hoult, Geoff Kellow, and Yvonne du Plessis, ‘In Vitro Fertilization: The Challenge of the Eighties’, Fertility and Sterility 36, no. 6 (1981): 699–706, 704.

  16. 16.

    Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA), ‘Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting to Examine In Vitro Fertilization’. Meeting 5 pm 25 May 1982, in ‘Folder of Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting (25 May 1982) to the Minutes of the 47th Meeting (9 August 1984) of the Committee to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation’. VARTA Collection, Melbourne, Folder 22, 5. Wood and John Leeton had themselves created an artificial fallopian tube in the early 1970s. Alan Trounson and Carl Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, Clinics in Obstetrics and Gynaecology 8, no. 3, 1981: 681–713, 687.

  17. 17.

    José Van Dyck, Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent: Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995), 72–73.

  18. 18.

    Andrew Veitch, ‘Adoption Plan by Test Tube Baby Doctors’, Guardian (UK), 30 January, 1982; Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 682.

  19. 19.

    The team of Ian Johnston had published in Fertility and Sterility a full four months before the birth of Candice Reed and even provided an exclusive to a popular women’s magazine at the same time, identifying Linda Reed. Alexander Lopata, Ian W. H. Johnston, Ian J. Hoult, Andrew I. Speirs, ‘Pregnancy Following Intrauterine Implantation of an Embryo Obtained by In Vitro Fertilization of a Preovulatory Egg’, Fertility and Sterility 33, no. 2, 1980, 117–20; ‘How the Medical Team Succeeded’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 20 February, 1980, 4–5. There had been a miscarriage in the unit at 20 weeks which was reported in April of 1980. ‘Test-Tube Mother Miscarries’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April, 1980.

  20. 20.

    McIntosh, ‘Scientist to Preach the Test Tube Baby Method’.

  21. 21.

    McIntosh, ‘Scientist to Preach the Test Tube Baby Method’.

  22. 22.

    Simon Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Publishing, 2005), 13.

  23. 23.

    Alan O. Trounson, John F. Leeton, Carl Wood, Beresford Buttery, Janice Webb, Jillian Wood, David Jessup, J. Mc. Talbot, and Gabor Kovacs, ‘A Programme of Successful In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer in the Controlled Ovulatory Cycle’, in Human Reproduction: Proceedings of III World Congress, Berlin, March 22–26, 1981, ed. Kurt Semm and Liselotte Mettler (Amsterdam; Princeton: Excerpta Medica; New York: Sole distributors for the USA and Canada, Elsevier North-Holland, 1981), 173–80. See also Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’.

  24. 24.

    Wood and colleagues reported 103 patients treated between March and October 1980. Carl Wood, Alan Trounson, John Leeton, J. McKenzie Talbot, Beresford Buttery, Janice Webb, Jillian Wood, and David Jessup, ‘A Clinical Assessment of Nine Pregnancies Obtained by In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, Fertility and Sterility 35, no. 5 (1981): 502–08, 502; Edwards reported in Nature on 122 patients (between October 1980 and mid-1981). ‘Test-Tube Babies, 1981’, 254; Johnston et al. reported in Fertility and Sterility on 402 treatment cycles carried out in 1979 and 1980 involving >177 patients. Johnston et al., ‘In Vitro Fertilization: The Challenge of the Eighties’, 701–702. As the Johnston and Wood teams split in June 1980, potentially there is a slight overlap in the numbers for each team’s studies from March to June.

  25. 25.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 451. Cohen’s personal notes from the Bourn Hall meeting do not provide numbers for the Scandinavian teams, but they were already active.

  26. 26.

    Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) was a known risk of ovulation induction in non-IVF fertility treatments, but was rarely mentioned. M. Mozes, H. Bogokowsky, E. Antebi, B. Lunenfeld, E. Rabau, D. M. Serr, A. David, and M. Salomy, ‘Thromboembolic Phenomena after Ovarian Stimulation with Human Gonadotrophins’, Lancet 286, no. 7424 (1965): 1213–15. The low number of eggs produced in the early 1980s suggests that dosages of some drugs might have been lower, and some of the drugs used have also changed over time.

  27. 27.

    Edwards, ‘Test-Tube Babies, 1981’, 253.

  28. 28.

    Johnston et al., ‘In Vitro Fertilization: The Challenge of the Eighties’, 699; Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 682; Edwards, ‘Test-Tube Babies, 1981’, 254.

  29. 29.

    Wood et al., ‘A Clinical Assessment of Nine Pregnancies’, 502, 503; McIntosh, ‘Scientist to Preach the Test Tube Baby Method’.

  30. 30.

    Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 684; Alan Trounson and Angelo Conti, ‘Research in Human In-Vitro Fertilisation and Embryo Transfer’, British Medical Journal (Clinical research ed.) 285, no. 6337 (1982): 244–48, 246.

  31. 31.

    Edwards, ‘Test-Tube Babies, 1981’, 256. Edwards placed ‘spare embryos’ in inverted commas.

  32. 32.

    Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 710; https://monashivf.com/about-us/history

  33. 33.

    Johnston et al., ‘In Vitro Fertilization: The Challenge of the Eighties’, 704; 700. Van Dyck also drew attention to this claim. Manufacturing Babies, 72.

  34. 34.

    Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 710–11.

  35. 35.

    ‘Discussion on the Ethics of Fertilization In Vitro’, in Human Conception In Vitro: Proceedings of the First Bourn Hall Meeting, ed. R. G. Edwards and Jean M. Purdy (London: Academic Press, 1982), 359.

  36. 36.

    Veitch, ‘Adoption Plan by Test Tube Baby Doctors’; Andrew Veitch, ‘First Test Tube Baby on NHS Is Only “A Matter of Time”’, Guardian (UK), 30 September, 1981.

  37. 37.

    David Hencke, ‘Doctors Warned on Test Tube Technology’, Guardian (UK), 3 July, 1981.

  38. 38.

    Martin H. Johnson, Sarah B. Franklin, Matthew Cottingham, and Nick Hopwood, ‘Why the Medical Research Council Refused Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe Support for Research on Human Conception in 1971’, Human Reproduction 25, no. 9 (2010): 2157–74, 2157.

  39. 39.

    Nicholas Timmins, ‘Doctor Explains Danger of Test Tube Baby Techniques’, Times (London), 3 July, 1981.

  40. 40.

    Veitch, ‘Adoption Plan by Test Tube Baby Doctors’; Andrew Veitch, ‘Thatcher May Hold Test Tube Babies Inquiry’, Guardian (UK), 11 February 1982, 1, 26.

  41. 41.

    ‘Test Tube Baby Plans’, Guardian (UK), 15 August, 1980; Angela Singer, ‘Test-Tube Twins Raise Questions on Method and Hopes for the Childless’, Guardian (UK), 15 December, 1981 (for Robert Winston quote); Douglas M. Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia: A History (Cremorne, NSW: Douglas M. Saunders, 2013), 66. Winston has remained in many ways an ‘IVF sceptic’. See also G. David Adamson and Anthony J. Rutherford, ‘The Commercialization of In-Vitro Fertilization’, in In-Vitro Fertilization: The Pioneers’ History, ed. Gabor Kovacs, Peter Brinsden, and Alan DeCherney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 240–48.

  42. 42.

    Sarah Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 45.

  43. 43.

    Carl Wood, ‘Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation. Meeting 5 pm 25 May 1982’, in ‘Folder of Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting (25 May 1982) to the Minutes of the 47th Meeting (9 August 1984) of the Committee to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation’. VARTA Collection, Melbourne, Folder 22, 9.

  44. 44.

    Edwards, ‘An Introduction to Bourn Hall’, 6.

  45. 45.

    Robert Edwards, Life Before Birth: Reflections on the Embryo Debate (London: Century Hutchinson, 1989), 17.

  46. 46.

    David Hencke, ‘Doctors Warned on Test Tube Technology’, quoting Michael Thomas.

  47. 47.

    Duncan Wilson, The Making of British Bioethics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 154–55.

  48. 48.

    Trounson and Wood, ‘Extracorporeal Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’, 706.

  49. 49.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 448.

  50. 50.

    T. C. Anand Kumar, ‘In Vitro Fertilization in India’, Current Science 86, no. 2 (2004): 254–56, 254.

  51. 51.

    The figures provided at the meeting do not include the Wood Monash team’s births. Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 451.

  52. 52.

    Trounson et al., ‘A Programme of Successful In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer’. 173–80; See also H. J. Kannegiesser, Conception in the Test Tube: The IVF Story: How Australia Leads the World (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988).

  53. 53.

    Geraldine Brooks, ‘Professor Wood Goes to Market for His Test Tube Babies’, The Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September, 1981. Bourn Hall issued a press release in the first week of October, to the effect that five babies had been born after treatment there in the previous year. Alan Rusbridger, ‘5 Born at Test Tube Clinic’, Guardian (UK), 6 October, 1981.

  54. 54.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 448.

  55. 55.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 450; René Frydman, interview with Nicola Marks, 13 April, 2016; University of Wollongong Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), 10 February, 2016 (approval HE/16028).

  56. 56.

    Edwards, Life Before Birth, 16.

  57. 57.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 13.

  58. 58.

    Brooks, ‘Professor Wood Goes to Market’; Veitch, ‘First Test Tube Baby on NHS Is Only “A Matter of Time”’; Angela Singer, ‘Test-Tube Twins Raise Questions’. Steptoe’s practice in Oldham, however, had been part of the NHS and, as Sarah Franklin notes, Edwards was a ‘lifelong socialist’. Sarah Franklin, ‘A Tale of Two Halves? IVF in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s’, in The Reproductive Industry: Intimate Experiences and Global Processes, ed. Vera Mackie, Nicola J. Marks, and Sarah Ferber (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019), 15–30, 17. The Monash team’s private fees were nonetheless well below those of Bourn Hall, providing the likely basis for Wood’s comments.

  59. 59.

    Bruno Lunenfeld, ‘Historical Perspectives in Gonadotrophin Therapy’, Human Reproduction Update 10, no. 6 (2004): 453–67, 456; John McBain, ‘Children of a Fertile Revolution: IVF’, Australian, 19 June, 2010, https://www.theaustralian.com.au

  60. 60.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 451.

  61. 61.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 451; Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 12.

  62. 62.

    H. W. Jones, Jr., ‘The Ethics of In Vitro Fertilization—1981’, in Edwards and Purdy, Human Conception, 351–57, 356.

  63. 63.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 14.

  64. 64.

    ‘Test Tube Babies—Whatever Next?’, Lancet 318, no, 8258 (1981), 1265–66, 1265.

  65. 65.

    ‘Test Tube Babies’, 1265–6.

  66. 66.

    Nicholas Timmins, ‘Wide Scope for Test Tube Baby Method’, Times (London), 9 December, 1981.

  67. 67.

    Timmins, ‘Wide Scope’.

  68. 68.

    Timmins, ‘Wide Scope’.

  69. 69.

    Veitch, ‘Thatcher May Hold Test Tube Babies Inquiry’; Martin H. Johnson, ‘Robert Edwards: The Path to IVF’, Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23, no. 2 (2011): 245–62. On prior use of the initials PGD, see the current AR glossary: Fernando Zegers-Hochschild, G. David Adamson, Silke Dyer, Catherine Racowsky, Jacques de Mouzon, Rebecca Sokol, Laura Rienzi, Arne Sunde, Lone Schmidt, Ian D. Cooke, Joe Leigh Simpson, and Sheryl van der Poel, ‘The International Glossary on Infertility and Fertility Care, 2017’, Human Reproduction 32, no.9 (2017): 1786–1801, 1798.

  70. 70.

    Veitch, ‘Thatcher May Hold Test Tube Babies Inquiry’.

  71. 71.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, ix–x.

  72. 72.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, x.

  73. 73.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 110.

  74. 74.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 120.

  75. 75.

    Ian Johnston, Warren Jones, and Douglas Saunders, ‘The Embryo Comes of Age: The First Decade of the Fertility Society of Australia’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 31, no. 1 (1991): 55–57.

  76. 76.

    Jane Adams, ‘Fertility Factors: Infertility, Medicine and the Law in New Zealand, 1950–2004’ (PhD diss., University of Otago, 2016), 180; Sally Wilde, ‘History of the Society’, Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand, https://www.usanz.org.au/history

  77. 77.

    Masakuni Suzuki, ‘In Vitro Fertilization in Japan: Early Days of In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer and Future Prospects for Assisted Reproductive Technology’, Proceedings of the Japan Academy. Series B, Physical and Biological Sciences 90, no. 5 (2014): 184–201, 188; H. Yui, ‘Clinical Application of In Vitro Fertilization and the Establishment of the Japan Society of Fertilization and Implantation’, Kagakushi kenkyu, 55, no. 278 (2016): 118–32, 132. For the several associations involved in Mexican AR, see Sandra P. González-Santos, ‘From Esterilología to Reproductive Biology: The Story of the Mexican Assisted Reproduction Business’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 116–27.

  78. 78.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 125.

  79. 79.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early days of IVF outside the UK’, 454.

  80. 80.

    ASPIRE, http://www.aspire-reproduction.org/about-us; Roberto Romero, ‘A Profile of Bruno Lunenfeld, MD, FRCOG, FACOG (hon)’, American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 219, no. 3 (2018): 225–34.

  81. 81.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 66.

  82. 82.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 10.

  83. 83.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 61–62; Johnston, Jones and Saunders, ‘The Embryo Comes of Age’, 56–57.

  84. 84.

    Jennie Smith, ‘IVF Pioneers: Field Marked by Competition, Innovation’, Ob. Gyn. News 51, no. 9 (1 September, 2016).

  85. 85.

    Sandra Blakeslee, ‘Trying to Make Money Making “Test-Tube” Babies’, New York Times, 17 May 1987.

  86. 86.

    Blakeslee, ‘Trying to Make Money Making “Test-Tube” Babies’.

  87. 87.

    Sally Wilde, ‘The English Patient in Post-Colonial Perspective, or Practising Surgery on the Poms’, Social History of Medicine 18, no. 1 (2005): 107–21; Sally Wilde, ‘See One, Do One, Modify One: Prostate Surgery in the 1930s’, Medical History 48, no. 3 (2004): 351–66.

  88. 88.

    Robert Edwards’ first Cambridge mentor, ‘Bunny’ Austin, was an Australian; both Subhas Mukerji (India) and Robert Edwards (the UK) had obtained their PhDs at Edinburgh, one of the world’s major centres of science and medicine, and Alan Trounson, an Australian, had a Cambridge doctorate.

  89. 89.

    Smith, ‘IVF Pioneers’.

  90. 90.

    Alan Hope, ‘30 Years of IVF in Flanders’, Flanders Today, 16 October, 2013, http://www.flanderstoday.eu

  91. 91.

    Suzuki, ‘In Vitro Fertilization in Japan’, 192–93.

  92. 92.

    Edwards, Life Before Birth, 17.

  93. 93.

    At one point, there were clinics at three cities in India, but these are in the process of liquidation. TVM Capital Healthcare, ‘Bourn Hall International’, https://www.tvmcapitalhealthcare.com/portfolio/bourn-hall-international, accessed 1 December, 2017 and 19 March, 2020.

  94. 94.

    Bourn Hall Fertility Centre, ‘International Patients’, http://www.bournhall-clinic.ae/international-patients, accessed 16 August, 2019. See also Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘The “Local” Confronts the “Global”: Infertile Bodies and New Reproductive Technologies in Egypt’, in Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies, ed. Marcia Inhorn and Frank van Balen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 263–82, 263.

  95. 95.

    Viola Hörbst, ‘“You Cannot Do IVF in Africa as in Europe”: The Making of IVF in Mali and Uganda’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 108–15, 110. Dr Mba’s full name is difficult to confirm with certainty and Hörbst elsewhere appears to refer to him only as Dr M.

  96. 96.

    ‘Inter-African group for study, research and application in relation to fertility’, the current ‘antenna’ countries for which include Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Congo Brazzaville, DR Congo, Senegal, Togo, Niger and Gabon. GIERAF, https://www.gieraf.org. See also Willem Ombelet, ‘The Development of In-Vitro Fertilization in Africa’, in Kovacs, Brinsden and DeCherney, In-Vitro Fertilization, 158–71.

  97. 97.

    Hörbst, ‘“You Cannot Do IVF in Africa as in Europe”’, 110; Lijing Jiang, ‘IVF the Chinese Way: Zhang Lizhu and Post-Mao Human In Vitro Fertilization Research’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 9, no. 1 (2015): 23–45, 37.

  98. 98.

    Thanks are due to Dr Megan Brayshaw for finding this history.

  99. 99.

    Bob Simpson, ‘IVF in Sri Lanka: A Concise History of Regulatory Impasse’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online, 2 (2016): 8–15, 10. On the work of one travelling embryologist in Ghana, see Trudie Gerrits, ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Ghana: Transnational Undertakings, Local Practices and “More Affordable” IVF’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 32–38, 34.

  100. 100.

    Ian Johnston, Interview with Waller Committee, 15 June 1983, in ‘Folder of Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting (25 May 1982) to the Minutes of the 47th Meeting (9 August 1984) of the Committee to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation’, VARTA Collection, Melbourne, Folder 22, 15.

  101. 101.

    Veitch, ‘First Test Tube Baby on NHS Is Only “A Matter of Time”’.

  102. 102.

    Hörbst, ‘“You Cannot Do IVF in Africa as in Europe”’, 110.

  103. 103.

    Johnston, Interview, 15 June 1983, 16.; Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 447.

  104. 104.

    Barbara Burton, infertility activist. Interview between Members of the IVF Committee and Representatives of the IVF Programme, 6 July 1983, in ‘Folder of Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting (25 May 1982) to the Minutes of the 47th Meeting (9 August 1984) of the Committee to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation’, VARTA Collection, Melbourne, Folder 22, 5; ‘Parents Make Big Gift to Test-Tube Project’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July, 1980.

  105. 105.

    Adams, ‘Fertility Factors’, 120.

  106. 106.

    IVF Friends was established in 1991.

  107. 107.

    AccessAustralia, http://access.org.au/?p=54

  108. 108.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 84.

  109. 109.

    ‘Here’s Why Private Equity Companies Are Buying Fertility Clinics’, MarketWatch, 6 April 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com

  110. 110.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 85–86; Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 109–10.

  111. 111.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 49, 125.

  112. 112.

    Blakeslee, ‘Trying to Make Money Making “Test-Tube” Babies’; Edwards, Life Before Birth, 181.

  113. 113.

    Olivier Lamour, Duels: Frydman/Testart, le divorce des pères, Duels series 2, episode 6, Morgane Production, screened France 5 Télévision, 26 February, 2015.

  114. 114.

    Jacques Testart, interview with Nicola J. Marks, 14 April, 2016.

  115. 115.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 71.

  116. 116.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 455–56.

  117. 117.

    Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 455. Key Nordic companies and products are: Bruel and Kjaer, Denmark (sonography, vaginal transducers); SweMed Lab (puncture needles, needle guides, equipment); K-Systems (laboratory equipment); MediCult (culture media); Vitrolife (culture media). Cohen et al., ‘Early Days of IVF outside the UK’, 456.

  118. 118.

    ‘IVF Devices and Consumables Market Outlook–2026’, https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/in-vitro-fertilization-devices-and-consumables-market

  119. 119.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 109.

  120. 120.

    Alan H. DeCherney, ‘Doctored Babies’, Fertility & Sterility 40, no. 6 (1983): 724–27, 725; Arnold S. Relman, ‘The New Medical-Industrial Complex’, New England Journal of Medicine 303, no. 17 (1980): 963–70.

  121. 121.

    Aditya Bharadwaj, ‘The Indian IVF Saga: A Contested History’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 54–61, 55.

  122. 122.

    Rebecca M. Albury, ‘“Babies Kept on Ice”: Aspects of the Australian Press Coverage on IVF’, Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 4 (1987): 43–71.

  123. 123.

    Edwards, Life Before Birth, 21, 63; Brooks, ‘Professor Wood Goes to Market’.

  124. 124.

    The Associated Press was the first news syndicate to have a specialist science reporter, Howard Blakeslee. One of the most penetrating pieces of investigative writing on IVF from the 1980s is the work of his journalist granddaughter, Sandra Blakeslee. ‘Trying to Make Money Making “Test-Tube” Babies’.

  125. 125.

    ‘Biologist Miriam Menkin Recalls Pioneer Efforts’, Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 30 July, 1978.

  126. 126.

    See Chap. 2.

  127. 127.

    Carl Wood, Interview with Waller Committee 15 June 1983, in ‘Folder of Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting (25 May 1982) to the Minutes of the 47th Meeting (9 August 1984) of the Committee to Examine In Vitro Fertilisation’, VARTA Collection, Melbourne, Folder 22, 18.

  128. 128.

    Wood, Interview with Waller Committee 15 June 1983, 10.

  129. 129.

    Quoted in Helen Szoke, ‘Social Regulation, Reproductive Technology and the Public Interest: Policy and Process in Pioneering Jurisdictions’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2004), 279.

  130. 130.

    Carl Wood and Ann Westmore, Test-tube Conception (Melbourne: Hill of Content, 1983).

  131. 131.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 82–83.

  132. 132.

    Brown, ESHRE: The First 21 Years, 117–19.

  133. 133.

    Saunders, Fertility Society of Australia, 83.

  134. 134.

    Louise Brown and Martin Powell, Louise Brown: My Life as the World’s First Test-Tube Baby (Bristol: Bristol Books CIC, 2015), 120.

  135. 135.

    Blakeslee, ‘Trying to Make Money Making “Test-Tube” Babies’.

  136. 136.

    Georgia Dullea, ‘Happy Parents Toast In-Vitro Births’, New York Times, 24 March, 1988.

  137. 137.

    Matthew Pinkney, ‘The Trouble with IVF’, Herald Sun (Melbourne), 25 July, 1998.

  138. 138.

    Jiang, ‘IVF the Chinese Way’, 26.

  139. 139.

    Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘Pioneering Procreation: Israel’s First Test-Tube Baby’, Science as Culture 6, no. 4 (1997): 525–40, 528–29; Andrea Whittaker, ‘From “Mung Ming” to “Baby Gammy”: A Local History of Assisted Reproduction in Thailand’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 71–78, 71; Simpson, ‘IVF in Sri Lanka’, 9. On Turkey’s ‘repro-nationalism’, see Zeynep B. Gürtin, ‘Patriarchal Pronatalism: Islam, Secularism and the Conjugal Confines of Turkey’s IVF Boom’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 39–46.

  140. 140.

    Jiang, ‘IVF the Chinese Way’, 27, 36.

  141. 141.

    Sumit K. Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution: Democratizing Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2–3.

  142. 142.

    Richard Togman, ‘The Third Modulation: Foucault, Security and Population’, Foucault Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 228–50, 231.

  143. 143.

    These developments can be understood within Foucauldian frame of ‘biopolitics’. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Vera Mackie, ‘Japan’s Biopolitical Crisis’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 2 (2014): 278–96.

  144. 144.

    The question of the multiple cultural entities that AR ‘reproduces’ is a central theme in Franklin, Biological Relatives.

  145. 145.

    Transfers with frozen embryos do not count within the limit of four, and the counter is re-set after each pregnancy; so, in practice many more than four inseminations can be covered. The reimbursements include medical costs, embryo transfer, embryo freezing and so on. Nicola Jane Marks, ‘Population, Reproduction and IVF in New Caledonia: Exploring Sociocultural and Caring Dimensions of Sustainable Development’, PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 14, no. 2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5410

  146. 146.

    Costs are covered either directly by the New Caledonia social security system, or by the CAFAT, Caisse de compensation des prestations familiales, des accidents du travail et de prévoyance des travailleurs salariés de Nouvelle Calédonie (compulsory health insurance for people in employment).

  147. 147.

    Gürtin, ‘Patriarchal Pronatalism’, 41.

  148. 148.

    Wood, Interview with Waller Committee 15 June 1983, 3.

  149. 149.

    Yousheng is derived from the English neologism ‘eugenics’, with its now-inevitable resonances of the destructive eugenics of the mid-twentieth century. Scholars argue that in China the term has taken on different nuances after several decades of use in its local context. Juliette Chung Yuehtsen, ‘Better Science and Better Race? Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics’, Isis 105, no. 4 (2014): 793–802; Jiang, ‘IVF the Chinese Way’, 32–35. See also Sarah Ferber, Bioethics in Historical Perspective (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013), 191.

  150. 150.

    ‘Here’s Why Private Equity Companies Are Buying Fertility Clinics’, MarketWatch, 6 April 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com, accessed 14 March, 2019.

  151. 151.

    John DiMoia, ‘Blastocysts and Family Planning: IVF and Tracking a Developmental Context for Biomedical Research in Singapore (1966–1994)’, Science Technology & Society 18, no. 3 (2013): 275–89, 275–79; Saw Swee-Hock, Population Policies and Programmes in Singapore, 2nd ed. (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016), 276–83.

  152. 152.

    Michal Rachel Nahman, ‘Romanian IVF: A Brief History through the “Lens” of Labour, Migration and Global Egg Donation Markets’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 79–87, 85. Nahman’s insertion of square brackets for the word ‘ethnic’ is crucial, as it highlights Basescu’s endorsement of the discriminatory view that someone can legally be a citizen and yet not truly of a country.

  153. 153.

    Shaun Walker, ‘“Baby Machines”: Eastern Europe’s Answer to Depopulation’, Guardian, 4 March, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com

  154. 154.

    Simpson, ‘IVF in Sri Lanka’, 9.

  155. 155.

    Sandra P. González-Santos, ‘The Sociocultural Aspects of Assisted Reproduction in Mexico’(PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2010), 45.

  156. 156.

    Lara Braff, ‘Somos Muchos (We Are So Many): Population Politics and “Reproductive Othering” in Mexican Fertility Clinics’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2013): 121–38, 125–26.

  157. 157.

    Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘Thirty-Five Years of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel’, Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2 (2016): 16–23, 17.

  158. 158.

    Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘Thirty-Five Years of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel’, 22; Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘The Politics of “The Natural Family” in Israel: State Policy and Kinship Ideologies’, Social Science & Medicine 69, no. 7 (2009): 1018–24, 1020. Susan Martha Kahn, Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

  159. 159.

    Jan Raath, ‘First Test-Tube Pregnancy Under Way in Black Africa’, Times (London), 23 October, 1987.

  160. 160.

    Michael Fitzgerald, ‘Fertile India’s IVF Program’, Herald (Melbourne), 25 April, 1989; John Zubrzycki, ‘Fertility Clinics in Demand as India’s Population Soars’, Australian, 25 November, 1996.

  161. 161.

    Ombelet, ‘The Development of In-Vitro Fertilization in Africa’, 165.

  162. 162.

    Marcia C. Inhorn and Pankaj Shrivastav, ‘Globalization and Reproductive Tourism in the United Arab Emirates’, supplement, Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health 22, no. 3 (2010): 68S–74S.

  163. 163.

    Data compiled by Dr Megan Brayshaw in 2019, based on the available literature.

  164. 164.

    Angela Singer, ‘Test-Tube Twins Raise Questions’.

  165. 165.

    Warwick Anderson challenges what he refers to as the ‘hydraulic’ view of global health history, trying to de-naturalise narratives of change that assume the actual outcome of a new development was always destined to be. Warwick Anderson, ‘Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine’, Social History of Medicine 27, no. 2 (2014): 372–84.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Sarah Ferber, Nicola J. Marks & Vera Mackie

Authors
  1. Sarah Ferber
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nicola J. Marks
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Vera Mackie
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ferber, S., Marks, N.J., Mackie, V. (2020). The Foundations of Global Assisted Reproduction. In: IVF and Assisted Reproduction. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7895-3_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7895-3_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-7894-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-7895-3

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation