By the summer of 1978, not one but two conception stories had made UK headlines that year. The bigger story was that of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”, who was conceived via in vitro fertilisation after her parents, Lesley and John, discovered that Lesley’s fallopian tubes were blocked and sought help from a team of doctors in Oldham. Though there had been some public hostility to the Brown pregnancy, once baby Louise was born that July, reassuringly healthy and “normal”, the UK press celebrated the feat of science. While it’s very easy to imagine that first procedure being framed as an unnatural, freakish intervention, IVF was instead heralded as an “all-British miracle”, as the Manchester Evening News put it.
Earlier that year, the Evening Standard published an investigation into Dr David Sopher, a gynaecologist in Belgravia who had been artificially inseminating lesbian patients at his private practice. Referring to Sopher as “Dr Strangelove”, the report falsely claimed he was acting against the advice of the British Medical Association. Artificial insemination wasn’t new, but the revelation that Sopher was performing the procedure on lesbians – rather than married couples where the husband was struggling with infertility – prompted condemnation. The Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson advocated banning the procedure for lesbians, claiming that to “bring children into this world without a natural father is evil”. Another Tory MP, Jill Knight, insisted that while she was “not concerned with the lifestyle of the lesbians”, she was alarmed, as “a child needs above all a normal and natural family”.
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