NZ’s first test-tube baby celebrates major milestone

When New Zealand’s first test-tube baby was born 40 years ago this month, such was the secrecy surrounding the historic event that the birth was induced so it would happen on a quiet Sunday. The announcement was delayed for 10 days and members of the IVF team did not even visit the new mum on the ward for fear her identity would leak.

Although these were momentous times for New Zealand in other ways – the end of Muldoonism at a snap election in July; the arrival of David Lange and Rogernomics – the birth still created national headlines and reporters clamoured to know more about the history-making family. As a young medical reporter for the now-defunct Auckland Star, I waited for hours at the hospital to collect the first supplied photo of the instantly famous, but anonymous, baby.

For 25 years, Felicity and Stephen Bell and their daughter Amelia kept their secret, revealing their identity finally in 2009. It was no surprise that at a recent function at Auckland City Hospital to mark the June 24 anniversary of Amelia’s birth, the trio remained in the audience rather than taking the stage as organisers had hoped.

But now they have agreed to speak once again, to express their gratitude to the team that forged ahead with the IVF programme at National Women’s Hospital despite orders from the then Auckland Hospital Board that the treatment – which had begun without official sanction – should stop.

At 27, Felicity Bell had been trying for three years for a second baby before her specialist, Celia Liggins, wife of obstetric researcher Graham “Mont” Liggins, referred her to fertility doctor Freddie Graham and the IVF team.

Until IVF technologies arrived in New Zealand – the first “test-tube baby” was born in the UK in 1978 – there was no way for women with blocked or missing fallopian tubes to conceive. Adoption was the only alternative. Fertility aids were limited to ovulation-boosting treatments such as hormone injections and, later, oral clomiphene tablets, used for women who did not release eggs and did not have periods.

“Freddie would say, ‘Come at this time and don’t let anybody see you,’” says Bell. “When I was doing egg retrievals, they’d line you up in theatre, and he said, ‘If anyone talks to you, just say you’ve got women’s problems.’”

At least the secrecy meant she always had a room to herself.

Although she had about a 6% chance of having a baby with the new technique, Bell conceived on just her second cycle of treatment when just one egg was retrieved, fertilised and re-implanted. “I thought Freddie was the most amazing thing that walked the Earth. Because look what he did.”