What Was the Fuss?

28 July 2003


Test Tube Baby Turns 25

Louise Brown, a postwoman in Bristol, England, turned 25 last Friday. That's no real news; lots of people had a birthday then, statistically about 1 in 365.25 of all people did. Except that Louise Brown was the first human ever conceived in vitro. Test-tube baby technology is a quarter of a century old, and some 114,000 Americans have been born this way. All of the ethical hand-wringing and the heated debates have faded into irrelevance as Ms. Brown went from embryo to fetus to baby to child to teen-ager to young woman. It seems that its hard to argue against the existence of real people, only against hypothetical ones. Cloning and other such issues will go the same way.

There are still people of pure heart and keen intellect who oppose the entire idea, virtue and being right need not go hand in hand. And the higher birth defects and lower birth weights that babies conceived this way experience illustrate that their case is not without some merit. Of course, it is still illegal to buy a baby in most countries, but sperm and ova are on the market and rent a womb is often cheaper than renting a room in a major city.

Yet there has not been an appreciable decline in the morals of the world that can be traced to in vitro fertilizations. Perhaps bio-ethics is largely a sterile school of philosophy. Perhaps when the lines are drawn, they ought to favor new knowledge over old custom.

Someday, someone will clone a human, or otherwise "tamper" with nature, and the hue and cry will begin. People will go red in the face over the impropriety of playing God. Meanwhile, Ms. Brown, the postwoman from Bristol, will go about her simple everyday life -- made possible at all because someone did tamper with nature.