America’s First IVF Baby Calls for Protections After Alabama Supreme Court Ruling

Elizabeth Carr, 42, is fighting for the treatment that now accounts for some 2% of U.S. births annually

By Amy Dockser Marcus | Photographs by Sophie Park for The Wall Street Journal
March 13, 2024
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Elizabeth Carr has always been a living symbol of fertility technology’s possibilities. Now she is the face of its challenges.

Carr poses for a portrait with her mother, Judith Carr.

Carr, 42 years old, is the first baby born by in vitro fertilization in the U.S. Over the years she has told countless audiences how the technology made it possible for her mother to have a baby.

Judith Carr with her week-old daughter, Elizabeth Carr. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

In the weeks since Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, Carr has called for protections around IVF procedures.

These procedures—extracting eggs, fertilizing them in a lab and transferring an embryo into a uterus—now account for some 2% of U.S. births annually.

Carr owns a locket she was gifted from the doctors at the fertility clinic in Virginia where she was born.

Carr leads public relations and patient advocacy at Genomic Prediction, which sells genetic tests to screen embryos. Doctors can order the controversial tests for patients who want to screen for diseases and abnormalities or get an overall embryo health score.

Patients and doctors can use the results to decide which embryos to transfer. Unused embryos can be stored for years. Some get discarded.

Carr’s work, like her life story, are reminders that technology has already advanced beyond the creation of embryos outside the body to techniques that raise deeply personal questions. The tests can reveal information that obliges potential parents to choose among embryos and envision what constitutes a good life.

For years, genetic tests allowed people who knew they carried genes for lethal diseases to choose embryos that didn’t have them. Genomic Prediction also sells a test to predict a future child’s risk of heart disease, schizophrenia, cancers and diabetes.

IVF doctors disagree over whether the benefit of the tests has been proven.

Carr says patients should know what the latest tests can do and decide for themselves. “If my mother had not been told by her doctor about IVF, I would not be here,” she said.

Elizabeth Carr appeared on the cover of Life Magazine when she was a baby. Photo: Sophie Park for The Wall Street Journal

Judith Carr, now 70, was an elementary school teacher living in Westminster, Mass., when her doctor told her she couldn’t have biological children. Carr had suffered her third ectopic pregnancy, when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus. 

The doctor handed her a pamphlet he picked up at a medical conference about a novel procedure called IVF. She and her husband, Roger, an engineer, flew to Norfolk, Va., and were accepted into a program that had made 41 unsuccessful IVF attempts up to then.

Judith and Roger Carr celebrate Elizabeth's birthday at Norfolk General Hospital. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

They transferred the embryo on Judith Carr’s 28th birthday. A few weeks later, she learned she was pregnant.

Magazines and news clippings from Carr’s childhood.

Carr received extensive medical testing including brain-wave measurements through her 20s. When she got pregnant naturally and had her now-13-year-old son, the IVF pioneers kept tabs on her pregnancy. “People wanted to make sure everything was normal,” Carr said.

The trajectory of Carr’s life illustrates how science often advances faster than the ethical rules to address it. Screening embryos for more complex conditions could eventually lead to scientists providing estimates about the likelihood of embryos having blue eyes, excelling in school or playing sports.

Carr embraces her mom.

Nationwide debate following the Alabama court decision could draw scrutiny to tests from Genomic Prediction and other companies. For Carr, the lines between the personal and the political often blur. “How do we explain our product to people?” Carr said. “How do I explain my life?”

Photo Editor:
Chase Gaewski

Produced by
Brian Patrick Byrne

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