A petri-keen life Nation’s first in vitro baby is now a healthy 25-year-old living in Maine

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Growing up in her small hometown of Westminster, Mass., Elizabeth Carr was accustomed to reporters and photographers showing up from time to time to follow her around. For the most part, they were respectful and professional. Her schoolmates didn’t take much notice; neither did others in the close-knit community.

“I understood I was different, but I didn’t think it was a very big deal,” she said in an interview at her home near Augusta on Saturday. “Everybody knew.”

What “everybody” in Westminster knew about young Elizabeth was that she was the first baby born in the United States who was conceived in vitro. In April 1981, her mother’s egg was fertilized with her father’s sperm in a petri dish in a hospital laboratory. The fertilized egg was nurtured for a few days in a special incubator and then implanted in her mother’s womb.

After an uneventful, full-term pregnancy, her mother, Orono native Judy Dalton Carr, gave birth to a healthy, completely normal baby girl at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va. When the baby was just three days old, doctors hosted a news conference, informing a fascinated public that the nation’s first “test-tube baby” was otherwise quite unremarkable.

Four months later, on April 17, 1982, Elizabeth Jordan Carr was baptized at the Church of Universal Fellowship in Orono, which was the same church where her parents had been married nearly a decade before. Her maternal grandparents, Frank and Dorothy Dalton, lived on Chapel Road and were professors at the University of Maine. The Daltons are deceased, but other family members still reside in the area.

Now 25 years old and recently married, Elizabeth Jordan Carr Comeau lives with her high-school-sweetheart husband, David, in a pretty, brown-shingled house on a back road in Chelsea, near Augusta. A 2004 graduate of Simmons

College, she works as a reporter for the Kennebec Journal. The couple shares their home with Chase, a laid-back beagle-hound mix with soulful eyes and a curious nose.

On Saturday, Judy Carr, who tutors at a private school near her home in Fitchburg, Mass., was visiting her daughter for the weekend. In a conversation around the living room coffee table, just before going out to get their hair done, the two women reflected on their history-making experience.

‘I had complete trust’

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the in vitro procedure was experimental and controversial. The world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown, had been born in England in 1978. Since then, only a handful of successful pregnancies had resulted in just a few other European countries. Researchers were frustrated at the lack of progress, the public was wary of the unknown possibilities, and critics charged scientists with “playing God.”

But for Judy Carr and her husband, Roger, the emerging technology offered a solution to a heartbreaking problem.

When she was a student at the University of Maine, Carr recalled, she had suffered a ruptured appendix and had undergone emergency surgery at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

“I remember my mother asking the surgeon if it would affect my ability to have children, and he said absolutely not,” she said. But years later, after three devastating ectopic pregnancies – in which a fertilized egg becomes stuck in a damaged fallopian tube on its way to the uterus – it was clear that the usual route to parenthood was never going to work.

“Roger and I just knew we were going to have children,” Carr said. “Maybe we were going to adopt, or maybe there was some other way, but we knew we weren’t going to go through our lives childless.”

Carr’s doctor told her about groundbreaking fertility work being done by clinical researchers in Norfolk, Va., and the couple scheduled an appointment. After an extensive interview and a medical work-up, they became one of 50 couples in a clinical trial being conducted by Howard and Georgeanna Jones, researchers who had built their careers studying fertility issues at Johns Hopkins University and now were running the Norfolk clinic. Judy Carr was 26 years old – just a year older than her daughter is now.

“I really didn’t have any fears,” she said Saturday. “There was so much we didn’t know. There was no Internet, so it wasn’t like we could look anything up. I just had complete trust in what they were doing. And it all happened very quickly.” Their initial visit to the clinic was in January 1980. They came back in April for the in vitro procedure.

The Joneses were the first researchers to use hormone therapy to improve the likelihood of harvesting a healthy, viable egg from a woman’s ovary at precisely the right time, Carr explained. They extracted two such eggs from her, fertilized one, implanted it and sent her to a local hotel to rest.

Of all the 50 couples who took part in that trial, she said, hers was the only implantation to “take.”

Not ‘special’

“Just one egg, and I’m it!” Elizabeth Comeau interjected, smiling at her mother.

Pretty, with brown hair and brown eyes, Comeau says she looks just like her father. But like her mother, she’s a good storyteller – a trait that comes in handy in her journalism career.

Comeau said her unusual beginnings did not turn her into a celebrity or make her self-important, because her family maintained a low profile, kept the media at arm’s length, and answered all her questions in a straightforward manner.

Annual reunions at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine, as the Norfolk clinic now is named, affirmed that there were plenty of other families like hers, she said. Although the family participated in a number of print and broadcast projects over the years, the focus was always on the in vitro fertilization technology itself and the exposure never made her feel “special.”

“Until I was 12 or so, I thought that one day I’d have my own IVF baby,” she laughed. “It wasn’t until later that I understood that it probably wasn’t the optimum.” She and David expect to have children “someday,” she added.

Every summer, Comeau attended Camp Jordan in Ellsworth for six weeks, “and I loved every minute of it,” she said.

“People were so shocked that I would send this precious child to overnight camp in the willywags of Maine,” Carr said. With all the attention her daughter had received, she explained, “I thought it was crucial she understand she’s not the only child in the world.”

Still, every few years, the media would come calling, looking for an update. The public exposure rubbed off – but in a good way.

“I grew up around reporters,” Comeau said. “As I got older, I could see that there were good reporters and bad reporters. I would joke around and tell them I could do it better than they could.”

“By the end of high school, she was turning it around and interviewing the reporters,” Carr said, pride in her voice.

Comeau’s interest in journalism blossomed in college. She interned with The Boston Globe, reported for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, and was awarded a yearlong fellowship at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She landed her position with the Kennebec Journal about two years ago and says she was happy to relocate to her mother’s home state. Her beat includes four towns, two school districts and other local stories as assigned.

Since Comeau’s birth, more than 2 million people around the world have been born through IVF technology – 400,000 in this country alone.