When New Zealand’s first test-tube baby was born 40 years ago this month, such was the secrecy surrounding the historic event that the birth was induced so it would happen on a quiet Sunday. The announcement was delayed for 10 days and members of the IVF team did not even visit the new mum on the ward for fear her identity would leak.
Although these were momentous times for New Zealand in other ways – the end of Muldoonism at a snap election in July; the arrival of David Lange and Rogernomics – the birth still created national headlines and reporters clamoured to know more about the history-making family. As a young medical reporter for the now-defunct Auckland Star, I waited for hours at the hospital to collect the first supplied photo of the instantly famous, but anonymous, baby.
For 25 years, Felicity and Stephen Bell and their daughter Amelia kept their secret, revealing their identity finally in 2009. It was no surprise that at a recent function at Auckland City Hospital to mark the June 24 anniversary of Amelia’s birth, the trio remained in the audience rather than taking the stage as organisers had hoped.
But now they have agreed to speak once again, to express their gratitude to the team that forged ahead with the IVF programme at National Women’s Hospital despite orders from the then Auckland Hospital Board that the treatment – which had begun without official sanction – should stop.
At 27, Felicity Bell had been trying for three years for a second baby before her specialist, Celia Liggins, wife of obstetric researcher Graham “Mont” Liggins, referred her to fertility doctor Freddie Graham
