The whole gang was there - the pioneers who were among the first test tube babies to be conceived 25 years ago, the kids who came from frozen embryos, and the fraternal twins separated in the lab and then born years apart.
Once considered to be controversial medical miracles, those born through in vitro fertilization, or IVF, are now bonded primarily by their parents' great relief.
Several hundred of these parents got together Sunday at Little Hills Ranch in San Ramon to eat hamburgers, swim and bond over their unique (and costly) bundles of joy, which set them back $12,000 to $15,000 every time they tried to get pregnant.
They had been invited to the 25th anniversary of their fertility clinic, the Reproductive Science Center of the Bay Area, which says it has now sent between 4,000 and 5,000 babies from the test tube into the world.
Some of those babies will never be told by their parents that they weren't created between the proverbial sheets. That isn't the case with Elizabeth Castro, a 24-year-old nightclub promoter, aspiring doctor and mother of two whose lab conception in 1984 was the first in the East Bay and made headlines.
On Sunday she finally met her doctor, Donald Galen, who - in an apparent bit of IVF humor - joked that he didn't recognize her.
"People had to go through a lot to get here," said Castro, who now lives in Arizona, recalling her mother's tales about her lengthy effort to conceive. "I never doubted that my parents wanted me. It wasn't an 'oops.' "
All these years later - and even after Nadya Suleman had octuplets and went on the "Dr. Phil" television show - Castro said she still must tell people the basics: that doctors extracted eggs from her mother's ovaries, fertilized them with her father's sperm and then transferred them days later to her mother's uterus.
"Some people still assume I don't know who my parents are," she said.
Then there was Brian Strickland, 24, said to be the second IVF baby born in Contra Costa County. The recent Sacramento State University graduate may have also been the second to face test-tube-related lectures from his parents.
"I always told Brian when he wanted to quit something, 'It took seven years to have you. If I would have quit, you wouldn't be here,' " said his mother, Toni Strickland of Martinez.
She recalled how she almost died when her fallopian tube ruptured after she tried artificial insemination through another clinic. Before that, she had been producing just two eggs per year rather than 12. Afterward, she produced one per year, at most.
Her son - who is her second child, but the first with her husband - was conceived during doctors' fourth attempt at IVF. Read more...
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
