Thank You, Leslie Brown

I read on MSN that Leslie Brown, the first woman to give birth after IVF, passed yesterday after a brief illness. She was 64.

I guess it's not surprising that I didn't know her name before this, as the news has always focused on her daughter, Louise, the "test tube" novelty, or the doctors, Dr. Patrick Steptoe and Dr. Robert Edwards, who developed the procedure and later earned a Nobel Prize. Leslie Brown's huge contribution as the mother to the first IVF baby* is almost seen as the inconsequential means to an end. She was just the incubator. No one cares about what she had to go through to have a baby, right?

I do.

I've thought of this woman and others like her while I was in the thick of my own cycles. The process of IVF is scary. The scans, medications to inject, retrievals and transfers, hoping and waiting--all of it is such an overwhelming undertaking both physically and mentally. And yet Leslie and women like her bravely marched into the unknown. I can imagine her determination...her need...to do whatever she could to have a baby.  After nine long years of struggle, that persistence to fulfill her desire for a family led her to courageously pioneer an incredibly invasive (and amazing) procedure.

Maybe Leslie Brown didn't think of it in those terms when she consented to IVF. Maybe she didn't question what she was about to do. Maybe she only thought of the end result and tried desperately to ignore the procedure that lay before her. I've felt my own desperation for children so I can certainly relate. (I'm sure many of us in the ALI world can.) The longer it took me to get and stay pregnant, the more intense my desire became, the more focused. Sometimes I think I would have done anything they said I could try.

I recognized that maybe we would all do something similar had we been in her place. I suppose when it comes to clinical trials and innovative techniques and procedures, women still are. However, there is something significant about Leslie Brown taking this huge leap of faith in her doctors and her dreams. She was the first proof IVF could actually work.

I am incredibly thankful to Leslie Brown. Without her paving the way, there might not be the technology needed to help me have my boys.

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*Doctors had tried some 80 times before Leslie Brown was able to successfully maintain a pregnancy. My heart aches for those 80 women. I hope they were able to finally achieve parenthood. More info here.