Fertile New World's Grateful Pioneer
Sun Herald
Sunday January 8, 2006
Australia's first test-tube baby, born in the full glare of the media, is now an outspoken journalist, Erin O'Dwyer writes.
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Candice Reed made headlines around the world. These days though her name has become little more than the answer to an obscure trivia question, a reference point in any discussion of the sexual revolution, and bold old headlines on yellowing newsprint.But for Australia's first IVF baby - now a bubbly 25-year-old journalist - life is anything but a historical footnote.Over a cup of tea in IVF Australia's York Street offices, Candice Reed dispenses wit and wisdom in equal parts as she talks about life as an IVF-ling. "My brother and I fought growing up," she admits. "And if we were particularly angry with each other he would call me the experiment, but it was always in jest. We're very close."Reed's birth on June 23, 1980, was splashed in newspapers everywhere - she was the world's third test-tube baby - and naturally she sparked a media frenzy. Since then, her parents' desire that she experience a normal childhood has kept her from the spotlight. But recently, the Federal Government's controversial proposal to limit funding and restrict access to IVF - which it has now abandoned - prompted Reed to speak out."If I can lend a voice and help raise the profile of IVF and show that it's quite normal and successful, I'm willing to do that," she says. "I'm supporting something that my parents believed in and I wouldn't be here otherwise."Reed's birth was the result of more than a decade's research by pioneering doctors and scientists working at the Royal Women's Hospital, as well as Monash and Melbourne universities. For her parents, John and Linda Reed, who joined the hospital's pilot program after having difficulty conceiving, it was the chance to have a much-wanted second child.Remarkably, Reed was born from a single egg, harvested from her mother without the use of hormones and fertilised with her father's sperm. What's more, her birth was the first natural IVF delivery.Doctors had prepared the family for the media frenzy. News crews camped outside the house and doorknocked their tight-knit town of Churchill in the Latrobe Valley. Each birthday the cameras came back but by then the Reed family - and the citizens of Churchill - had become fierce guardians of the child's privacy.Reed says she is grateful for her parents' decision. "I went to school, had braces, bad skin, glowed red whenever a cute boy looked at me, played sport, learnt to ride without training wheels, learnt to drive, moved out of home, got a job and now live and work overseas."Life may have been normal for Reed, but it has nonetheless been exciting. She won a cadetship with her local paper and five years later travelled to London to try her luck on Fleet Street. Like many other young journos, she has found herself funding her European travel with freelance writing and other odd jobs.Reed appreciates the irony that journalism found her eventually. But the irony was complete when she decided to speak out against the Government's proposed plans and found herself fielding questions and chairing forums. "It's strange," she says. "Very strange."What has kept her going, she says, is a determination to remind people just how precious the gift of life is to families who cannot conceive naturally. "Being an IVF baby makes me no different to anyone else," Reed says. "We're all normal kids and adults now."There are now 57 registered IVF clinics nationwide, collecting 25,000 eggs a month. The success rate is remarkable - for women under 38 the chances of taking home a baby are between 25 and 30 per cent - and twice as high as conceiving naturally, says IVF Directors Group medical director Professor Michael Chapman.The Government funds about half the cost of each cycle, which means the patient pays about $3500 a cycle, less any private insurance rebate, he says. But he argues that, while we spent $78 million on IVF last year, $33.6 billion was spend on the total health budget.Stifling IVF, he says, flies in the face of Australia's low birthrate and the undeniable trend that more women are having fewer children later in life. "IVF technology has produced 7000 children a year, children who become contributing adults," he says. "Yet we spend vast amounts of money on keeping dying people alive."If a woman has had two or three cycles and we are unable to stimulate her ovaries, or her eggs are of repeatedly poor quality, we say: 'Your time has come to accept that this is not for you.' The decision about whether a patient should receive treatment or not is for the doctor and the patient to decide themselves on an individual basis, taking into account the risks and the costs, and the chances of success."For Linda Reed there is no hidden agenda. For years she protected her daughter from the media scrutiny. Now she has supported her, even joined her, in her decision to speak out. Like so many women, Reed still remembers what the overwhelming desire to have a child feels like. And her message is simple: every woman should have the chance to know the joy of giving birth."Candice has known from the day she came home that she's been IVF," her mother recalls quietly. "I would show her the scrapbook and sit with her in the bath and repeat the story over and over again. We would have gone back for more but we had a son and a daughter - and that was fulfilling enough for me."
© 2006 Sun Herald