Ruth Deech: How Britain led the way in IVF – and the debate that followed

This year sees the 30th birthday of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown. Her arrival was met with enormous press interest. Thousands of couples signed up for the same treatment, but the Catholic Church objected, drawing battle lines that are still evident.

Today we tend to treat IVF as almost routine but it is salutary to remember the headlines then: it was thought that IVF children might be damaged or deformed because of lack of some early essential ingredient of the mother's womb, or be different in some terrible shocking way.

Then there were the ethical concerns about conception outside the body and treatment of the embryo, concerns which are even stronger today than they were 30 years ago: millions around the world believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception and that it is wrong to interfere with nature and wrong to tamper in any way with the embryo, let alone do research on it or store it in a freezer.

IVF goes to the heart of many of our most important beliefs and traditions about the commencement and sanctity of life; the nature of the family and marriage; the soul, dignity, autonomy, the difference between humans and animals, our control over the nature of the next generation and indeed the purpose of life and childbearing. There are no more profound debates to be had in any other topic, and they all started with the British success in achieving fertilisation of the egg by sperm in the laboratory.

Britain has enjoyed a further success in this field. By creating a climate in which embryo research is regulated and supported, Britain encouraged the use of that research not only to create babies but to cure life-threatening diseases. My theme is that from the day of Louise Brown's birth to this, the story of IVF is one of a struggle for dominance, a struggle arising from the fascination and power of the techniques involved. Any government or church will want to have their say, indeed to control, the ways in which the next generation may be born and shaped, and this is what is presented by the scientific development of infertility medicine.

Baroness Ruth Deech of Cumnor DBE is Gresham Professor of Law. This is an extract from a talk she gave at Gresham College