Podcasts / In Depth, Out Loud

Infertility through the ages, and how IVF helped change the way we think about it – podcast

Published: July 25, 2018 12:43am EDT

Tracey Loughran, University of Essex

Author

Tracey Loughran
Reader in History and Deputy Dean of Humanities (Research), University of Essex

Disclosure statement

Tracey Loughran receives funding from the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust.

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University of Essex provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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CC BY-ND16.2 MB (download)

To all outward appearances, Louise Brown looked exactly the same as thousands of other babies when her blinking, slightly quizzical gaze met newspaper readers on the morning of July 25, 1978. But as the first child born using the technique of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), she was utterly unique in the history of humankind.

This audio version of a long read article written by Tracey Loughran, Reader in History at the University of Essex, tracks the history of infertility and how the experience of involuntary childlessness has changed. It’s read by Gemma Ware.

You can read the text version of the article here.

The music in this podcast is Night Caves, by Lee Rosevere from the Free Music Archive. A big thanks to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record. You can subscribe to this podcast here.

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