Elizabeth Carr (first US IVF baby) and Genomic Prediction in WSJ

Elizabeth Carr (first US IVF baby) and Genomic Prediction in the Wall Street Journal.

Elizabeth Carr has always been a living symbol of fertility technology’s possibilities. Now she is the face of its challenges. 

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. 

In the weeks since Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, Carr has called for protections around IVF procedures—extracting eggs, fertilizing them in a lab and transferring an embryo into a uterus—that now account for some 2% of U.S. births annually. 

Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said federal legislation backing IVF access would “enable the Elizabeth Carrs of the world to continue to be born.” Kaine invited Carr to accompany him on Thursday to President Biden’s State of the Union address. 

“My life gives people hope,” Carr said. 

The Alabama ruling is galvanizing Carr’s work in another way. Carr leads public relations and patient advocacy at Genomic Prediction, which sells genetic tests to screen embryos. Doctors can order 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. ...

A conversation with Elizabeth