Zheng Mengzhu, the country’s first “test tube baby,” smiles for the camera. (Photo : Women of China)
It would be silly or downright nasty--or both--if someone would ask Zheng Mengzhu how she fit inside a test tube.
Zheng Mengzhu, the country’s first “test tube baby,” said in an interview that she didn’t like the overwhelming attention showered to her by the media and the general public while growing up.
Now 27, Zheng told China Daily, “I’m better at handling it now.”
Once upon a time in the 1980s, a couple from Gansu Province--a male farmer and a female elementary school teacher--went to Beijing and stayed there for a year in a rented apartment as they pinned their hope to have a child on the in vitro fertilization (IVF) program offered by the city’s Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH).
Zheng Guizhen, Mengzhu’s mother, never conceived a child even after being married for 20 years. Guizhen’s blocked fallopian tubes prevented her from getting impregnated.
The then 38-year-old Guizhen sought the help of Zhang Lizhu, the director of PUTH’s Department for Gynecology and Obstetrics Department that time, according to The Embryo Project Encyclopedia.
Zhang, now 95, led the research team that made pregnancy possible for Guizhen. She performed the ovum retrieval surgery on Guizhen in June 1987.
The fertilization became successful on June 25. Guizhen’s urine test taken on July 6 indicated that she was pregnant.
On March 10, 1988, Guizhen gave birth to Mengzhu through Caesarean section (C-section) at PUTH.
Mengzhu then became “China’s first baby conceived through human in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer (ET), commonly referred to as a ‘test tube baby.’”
She was 52 centimeters long and weighed 3.9 kilograms, according to Xinhua.
IVF, also called test-tube conception, is a “medical procedure in which mature egg cells are removed from a woman, fertilized with male sperm outside the body, and inserted into the uterus of the same or another woman for normal gestation,” according to Britannica, an online encyclopedia.
Gestation refers to the time between conception and birth.
For the successful pregnancy, Zhang won the first prize for the Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award and second prize for the National Science and Technology Progress Award.
On her 20th birthday in 2008, Mengzhu told Xinhua that despite of the process how she was conceived, “I feel just a normal person.”
Mengzhu presently works at PUTH. The single lady manages records at the information section of the hospital’s Center of Reproductive Medicine, formerly called Test Tube Baby Lab back in the '80s.
Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby,” was born on July 25, 1978, in Oldham General Hospital in England. The 37-year-old English woman is married and has two children.
