Articles labeled: today show

Nowadays the technical advances made in fertility treatments seem commonplace enough to not even be noteworthy any longer. But we’re old enough to remember back when the whole controversy surrounding “test tube babies” and the discussion of whether or not it was “playing god” — seems like it was just yesterday. But apparently not, as the first twins born through in vitro fertilization are celebrated their 25th birthday on the “Today” show:

With [Heather Tilton and her brother, Todd Tilton II] was their mother, Nan Tilton, 56, who had been told that she and her husband, Todd Tilton, Sr., would never have children and should quit trying. She was 30 years old in 1982 and the couple had been married for eight years and been trying to conceive for six.

But her fallopian tubes were blocked and his sperm count was low, and even after five surgeries between the two of them, their chances of conceiving were still virtually zero.

“We tried every technique and were told we would never have a child,” she told TODAY’s Ann Curry. That news was, she said, “absolute heartbreak.”

A Quaker, Nan Tilton prayed for guidance and felt strongly that she should not surrender to medical opinion. “I felt very strongly that if we tried and never gave up, it would work,” she said.

There was one chance, and it was a slim one at the time. It was a new and controversial technology called in vitro fertilization that generated massive media coverage in 1978 when the first child, Louise Joy Brown, was born in England.

And here we thought our 4 year old was a smartypants because of his reading skills, but this little girl makes him look illiterate:

Elizabeth Barrett is to all appearances your standard 17-month-old girl, complete with wisps of gossamer hair so blond it’s almost white and the unsteady gait that is the definition of a toddler. As her parents and two other adults talk earnestly around her, she paws through a couple of large-format children’s books on a table, blissfully unaware of the conversation around her.

Then TODAY’s Ann Curry holds up a sheet of paper with the word “HAPPY” printed in big, block letters and asks Elizabeth to read it.

“Hap-py,” Elizabeth chirps without hesitation, enunciating each syllable in a bright little voice.

Nature or nurture?

Katy Barrett and her husband, Michael, are speech pathologists, and when Elizabeth was born, they said on Monday, they started teaching her sign language along with spoken language. They read to her often, and her favorite television program — the only one her parents let her watch — was a PBS show called “Signing Times,” which teaches kids sign language.