Nearly 30 years after the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Kenya on Tuesday celebrated the deliveries of the first children conceived through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the country.
The two baby girls were born to two mothers, aged 30 and 35, at a private hospital in the capital on Monday and photos of the infants were splashed across the front page of Kenya’s leading Daily Nation newspaper.
Christine Mutebi, maternity matron at Nairobi’s Avenue Hospital, told Agence France-Presse that both sets of girls and mothers were healthy after the deliveries by Caesarian section but declined further comment.
The births come as Kenya’s rising middle classes increasingly look to alternative methods of conception due to rising infertility rates, caused notably by sexually transmitted diseases, according to health workers.
”By these deliveries, it is opening future treatment of infertile couples and indicates that we can do it locally,” Joshua Noreh, the doctor who performed the in-vitro fertilisation, was quoted as saying by the Nation.
Another seven Kenyan women are currently pregnant following an IVF cycle, he said.
The procedure, which first successfully produced an infant in Britain in 1978, involves the injection of a man’s sperm directly into a woman’s egg in a laboratory prior to implantation into the mother’s womb. — Sapa-AFP