Born in 1981, Elizabeth Carr ’04 made headlines as the first in-vitro baby born in the United States. “IVF was my parents’ only hope of creating the family they so desperately wanted after experiencing three ectopic pregnancies. . . My birth . . . gave hope to millions of Americans who wanted to become mothers and fathers,” she writes in an article in WBUR’s Cognoscenti.
In response to the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos constitute “extrauterine children,” Carr writes: “No one understands better than the infertility community that embryos are not children. Success in IVF means bringing home a baby, not solely creating embryos.”