#IVFis40

Editor’s Note: IVFis40 is the hashtag used by the IVF industry to both call attention to the messages it wants the public to see, and to generate new business leads. There’s another side to the #IVFis40 message. It’s #UnmaskingIVF

This is our first photo essay created July 21, 2018, in the week that Louise Brown turns 40. The photos document a visit to Bourn Hall, Cambridgeshire — location of the first commercial IVF clinic in 1980, and the place where Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe revealed their ‘test tube baby’ success in July 1978. 

IVF is 40…
We are infertile and were not able to procreate.

IVF offered us Hope but gave us two miscarriages of someone else’s genetic child, and a debt of $23,000. We were both driven to the brink of suicide, financial ruin, relationship disintegration, career breakdown and eleven years of our adult lives were destroyed. We cannot tell this story in any other way.

IVF is 40 …
Visiting Patrick Steptoe’s grave in the parish church adjacent to Bourn Hall Clinic. Remembering the ‘miracle’ baby that ‘Hope’ never gave to us, nor to millions of others who have tried IVF since 1978.

IVF is 40 …
Contemplating the party to which we and millions of others for whom IVF has failed, were not, and never will be, invited.

IVF is 40 …
Knowing that so long as the sun shines, our loss is a shadow that stalks us.