40 Minutes

The Gift of Life (1986x14)

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The Gift of Life, with Nicholas Woolley, reveals in detail, for the first time, the dramatic human story of what would-be parents have to go through to have a test-tube baby. In October 1984 seven couples came to London's Hammersmith Hospital, where Robert Winston was the first consultant in Britain to offer IVF - fertilisation of the mother's egg by the father's sperm in a test-tube - on the NHS. This film follows what happened to them over the next year. Sue, at 39, has been trying for a baby for ten years. She'd had a miscarriage, 18 operations and five previous attempts at IVF - privately. They had cost her and her husband £7,000. Dawn, a hairdresser from Middlesex, felt so guilty about not being able to give her Italian husband a child that her marriage nearly broke up. Sharon, only 23, had nearly died during surgery after an ectopic pregnancy. The odds were against any one of the seven women conceiving a child.