1996: Blob of cells

A few years ago, when Elizabeth Carr's class was learning how an egg combines with sperm in the mother's body to create a child, she felt compelled to interrupt.

"I piped up to say that not all babies are conceived like that and explained about sperm and eggs and petri dishes," said Elizabeth, now 14, the first child in the United States born through in vitro fertilization.

Because her mother's landmark pregnancy was documented in great detail by a film crew, Elizabeth has seen pictures of the egg and sperm that united to become her, the petri dish where she was conceived, the embryonic blob of cells that grew into the bubbly young woman who now plays field hockey and sings in the school chorus.

Elizabeth and her parents, Roger and Judith Carr of Westminster, Mass., are pioneers in what is all too often a forgotten afterword to the saga of infertility: the world of children and families, holidays and birthday celebrations that without new technologies would never have been....

...Although most couples who have had miracle babies yearn for normalcy, they say there are always the reminders of their history -- from the first picture in the baby album showing a blob of cells to the birth certificate processed six months late because the application did not have enough blanks to explain how their child entered the world.

Following the advice of their lawyer, Ms. Lee and Mr. Turbayne had filled in their names as "mother" and "father" on the applications for the birth certificates, since their own egg and sperm were involved.

But the State of Pennsylvania initially rejected their application, ruling that Dee, who had given birth to the twins, should be listed as the mother and Mr. Turbayne as the father. "They insisted I was an egg donor," Ms. Lee recalled. "But if I was an egg donor, my husband was a sperm donor. It just drove home what a new path we were walking."[NYT - January 10, 1996]