African Woman and Child Feature Service

Women who have delivered through IVF are complaining that the use of the term test tube babies is stigmatising them, their children and husbands, making it difficult for them to share publicly how they conceived their babies.

“Why then does the society not refer to those children conceived through natural means as sex babies? This is unfair to babies conceived through IVF,” wonders Flora.

Flora and other beneficiaries of IVF say the connotation of this term is that children conceived through this technology are lesser beings compared to those conceived in a natural way. To them, these babies need to be referred to as In Vitro babies and not test tube.

“These babies do not grow in a test tube the way people think, and to imply that those conceived through IVF are different babies makes it difficult for women to seek help,” says Flora.

Three of the women interviewed by the Nation said their men have refused to go for another IVF treatment arguing that the use of the term reduces their role to nothing.

“I want a second child, but my husband says the reference to his daughter as a test tube baby is devastating, leaving him to think his role was only giving the sperm and the rest done by a doctor in the laboratory,” one of the women complained.

Men and women who have benefited from this technology blame the media for fueling stigma by constantly using the term test tube babies and portraying those born through IVF as extraordinary beings.

Interestingly, it is the press that coined the term in 1940s, at the time when Harvard researcher Miriam Menkin’s registered a major success by fertilizing a human egg in the laboratory in 1944.

But the practice in many IVF laboratories, including Kenyan ones, is mixing the sperm and the egg in a petri dish and not test tube, for fertilization to take place.

“The fact is my children are as bright, pretty and active like any other baby. In fact nobody knows they were conceived through this technology,” says Irene. “I therefore wonder why people look shocked when you tell them how the baby came about.”

Another woman said because of this stigma, her husband has refused to discuss how their son was conceived or any suggestions of getting a second child through the same process.

“There is need to rename this thing because the only different is the mode of conception,” adds Juliet.

Even the church, which has sometimes been uncomfortable with IVF calling it a science trying to do what God does, procreation, they have avoided stigmatizing children conceived using the technology.

In its statement in 1987, the Vatican declared that: “every child which comes into the world through in vitro fertilization must in any case be accepted as a living gift of the divine goodness and must be brought up with love.”

While the natural conception occurs when a man and woman have sexual conduct, the one of IVF occurs when the woman’s eggs and man sperms are retrieved and fertilized in the laboratory.

The fertilized eggs are left for two to five days to develop into embryos before being transferred back into the woman’s uterus for normal pregnancy to take place.

Both the woman who conceive through natural means and the one who does so through IVF, carry their pregnancies to term, for nine months. The only difference between them is how the eggs were fertilised.

The first IVF baby in the world was born in July, 1978 in England. IVF is a technique used to treat women with without eggs, with blocked or damaged fallopian tubes - the avenue through which the egg travels from the ovary to the uterus for implantation to take place – and men with poor sperm quality.