First IVF baby speaks about new film ‘Joy’ centred on her miraculous birth

The new film called Joy tells the astonishing story of how the three pioneers of IVF battled widespread opposition, ITV News Arts Editor Nina Nannar reports
Meeting Louise Joy Brown in person certainly gives you a moment to pause. You are shaking hands with history, the first IVF baby.
In 1978, newspaper headlines dubbed her the first test tube baby. It wasn’t a test tube but a bottle called a desiccator that was used but hey ho, test tube is a good headline that stuck.
Louise is supporting a new film called Joy which tells the astonishing story of how the three pioneers of IVF battled widespread opposition, not least from religious groups, in their ten-year medical journey to figure out how to fertilise an egg outside the mother’s body and then implant it into the womb.
It is a tale of determination in the midst of huge obstacles and when I met Louise at Bourn Hall in Cambridge – which surgeon and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, scientist Bob Edwards and embryologist Jean Purdy set up in 1980 – you could see the pride in her face.
She has since lost her parents John and Lesley, who made history with her all those decades ago, but stresses how the IVF treatment gave the couple so much in their lifetime.
They were working-class people she says, part of the reason they were chosen for the treatment, and that IVF on the NHS today is often difficult to access, with rises in waiting times for gynaecological appointments, more people seeking private treatment, and paying widely different amounts according to where they live.
The writers, Jack Thorne and his wife Rachel Mason, went through seven rounds of IVF before their son was born.
They say it is not taken seriously enough arguing that people who have difficulties conceiving have a right to access NHS medical treatment. Instead, IVF is seen as a luxury – even a middle-class pursuit.
Rachel quotes a recent report on the number of PTSD cases following failed IVF courses.
If the film seeks to give the whole picture about the struggles involved in bringing IVF into creation, it also aims to right the wrong that was historically done against Jean Purdy – the world’s first embryologist who has largely been written out of history in the story of IVF.
She died at age 39, without any children of her own, from cancer and very little was subsequently written by her because the cast says she was a woman in what was then a very male world.
Bill Nighy who plays Patrick Steptoe says he learned that it was even regarded as a lesser science for someone like Steptoe to deal with women’s fertility issues.
And so Joy puts the woman in the centre frame. Jean Purdy is seen as a force in helping the many women who underwent treatment on the road to Louise Joy Brown being born; it is hoped.
It is the long overdue recognition of her astonishing work, as well as giving a picture of how much IVF was wanted – is still wanted – and the different ways in which it’s accessed today. Many decades after the world got its first so-called test tube baby.
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