Louise Joy Brown was born in Oldham, England, on 25 July 1978, becoming the first person conceived through in vitro fertilisation. The work of Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards, and Jean Purdy opened a new era in reproductive medicine. The birth provoked wonder, ethical debate, and intense media attention around technology, parenthood, and the beginnings of life.

IVF reshaped poetic and cultural language around birth, creation, motherhood, and the laboratory. Poets and novelists of the late twentieth century increasingly confronted questions of artificial reproduction, genetic choice, and the meaning of being 'made', themes that later became central to bioethical and speculative literature.