Edwards’s creation of the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in Oldham, England, had been anything but unproblematic. An enormous amount of consternation surrounded the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of this scientific breakthrough. The Vatican was up in arms. Pundits warned of a “brave new world” of babies made in test tubes. Critics declared IVF unethical and “against nature” itself. They thought it would turn the most human of activities—creating life—into a coldly detached capitalist endeavor that would objectify women and children and leave humankind soulless. But soon enough, the public came to see IVF as simply another way to help people have families. By the time Edwards died, IVF had been used to conceive over four million children worldwide.
Through the fluctuating public perceptions of his work, Edwards steadfastly advocated for IVF’s accessibility to anyone having difficulty with fertility. He soon acquired an almost grandfatherly aura, and his death was marked by a host of laudatory obituaries. Edwards’s first graduate student, Martin Johnson, told The Guardian upon his mentor’s death:
Bob Edwards was a remarkable man who changed the lives of so many people. He was not only a visionary in his science but also in his communication to the wider public about matters scientific in which he was a great pioneer.
He will be greatly missed by his colleagues, students, his family and all the many people he has helped to have children.
I am a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the School of Law and the School of Public Health, and have worked in the areas of bioethics and reproductive and genetic technologies for nearly two decades. I remember being struck by the announcement of Edwards’s Nobel Prize, marveling at how such a wildly controversial procedure at its inception had, by 2010, become rather ordinary medicine that was celebrated for making new kinds of families possible. Shortly after the news broke, I exchanged emails with a colleague in England, where Edwards had worked for most of his life. During our conversation, they told me, rather nonchalantly, that Edwards was a long-standing member of the Eugenics Society in Britain.
I was stunned. The guy who developed IVF was a eugenicist? Part of me couldn’t believe it. Yet, the part of me that had studied the eugenics movement knew it was all too possible. Shortly after the email exchange, I reached out to the Eugenics Society of Britain—renamed the Galton Institute in 1989 after the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton (the group is now called the Adelphi Genetics Forum)—and asked one of their staff members if Robert Edwards was a member of the organization. “Yes,” they proudly affirmed.