New Zealand's first IVF embryologist, Dr John Peek. Photo: Anthony Phelps
A doctor, labelled as New Zealand's first embryologist, says the country has come a long way from where it stood on treatments and technologies for reproductive health.
Dr John Peek has been recognised for his services to fertility treatment and reproductive health with a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit on King's Birthday.
In a statement, Minister of Health Shane Reti labelled Peek as "New Zealand's first embryologist", saying he helped train and influence other embryologists.
"He was instrumental in establishing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) services in New Zealand at the National Women's Hospital in Auckland, and his innovations in IVF treatment have been recognised worldwide and accepted as the international standard."
Jocelyn Goodman - one of the first IVF mothers in New Zealand - said she was thrilled for Peek.
He was among the trailblazing doctors who helped her undergo IVF in secret at National Women's Infertility Unit, where New Zealand's first IVF baby was conceived in the early '80s.
The secrecy was required because the treatment had not yet been sanctioned by the health board, Peek and Goodman told RNZ's King's Birthday Morning with Paddy Gower.
"I did see in my early days when I was working in Australia, some people with very strong religious and philosophical stance against [reproductive] technology," Dr Peek said.
"But over the years when people have done surveys of attitudes to reproductive technologies, it's become accepted, and I think that's partly because it's no longer weird but just every day, and also people are sharing their stories a lot more."
Among those sharing their stories was Goodman.
"When I was trying to conceive, infertility was a secret thing and you never ever confessed to it. And that has completely changed. It was a very lonely place because you didn't want to tell anybody what was happening and nobody told you either."
IVF goes from 'embryonic' to mainstream
This month marks 40 years since New Zealand's first IVF baby was born.
The birth of Amelia Bell in June 1984 - only six years after the world's first baby conceived outside the womb - was a medical breakthrough in the country's fertility treatment.
However, the history-making event was kept under the radar at the time, with the technology and its pioneering practitioners facing intense public backlash.
Dr Peek said there was a strong "feminist" reaction among people who felt IVF was experimenting with women's bodies, especially because the treatment staff were mostly males at the time.
"I think a lot of people were a bit suspicious of it, because it was new."
Goodman recalled one "aggressive" feminist saying to her "I wouldn't buy a baby", but most people had responded positively to her.
"If I'm completely out of sync with a fundamentalist Christen view, I just toss it off, I don't care."
Nevertheless, Peek said it felt pioneering.
"A lot wasn't known [at the time] and so you're improvising a lot and obviously reading the medical literature and analysing our data as it came along."
They went from helping about 12 people a year to about 2000 a year now.
"It's been great to see it grow from something that was so unformed, like literally embryonic, to mainstream and making a real significant contribution to society.
"I can remember especially in the early days, like I would take my own children to soccer and then a mum would come up and say so and so in your son's soccer team came from the IVF programme, it does feel very special."
'Happy to be one of the guinea pigs'
Peek remembers Goodman's embryos because they had the "perfect" textbook appearance.
"I'm not sure they're textbook children [now]," he jokes.
His own son is similar in age to Goodman's children, who he has seen grow up.
"It sort of feels like part of the family really."
Goodman's IVF journey started after trying for eight years to have a baby with her husband. She got a call from her doctor Freddie Graham, who is one of the masterminds behind the National Women's Infertility Unit, asking if she wanted to be part of an "experimental programme".
"We were told not to tell anybody but to come into hospital for treatment."
She didn't feel it was an experiment because she had no problems with the process and had heard about it being done overseas.
"I was just happy to be one of the guinea pigs really."
Seeing her future child was a "miraculous" experience, she said.
"You have no expectations that this is going to work, but I remember waking up when they were doing the egg pick-up, and I had number one written on my hand and I thought one egg - there's no way that's going to work.
"For the second one ... it was only two cells and that looked like a little piece of onion skin and I thought it's never going to make it, something that little can never make its way back in and find its way into my womb, but it did."
She was acutely aware not everybody was fortunate in their IVF attempts.
"The success rate in those days was really very low ... I was very aware that my joy was somebody else's heartbreak."
Looking ahead
There were some new technologies in reproduction which had not been able to used for humans yet due abnormalities and reliability problems, Peek said.
"Potentially, we could be facing the same sort of revolution in reproduction, because it is possible now in animals to start making artificial eggs from artificial sperms from just ordinary tissue.
"Technically at the moment, it's too problematic to consider it but you never know, something like that could be feasible in 10 years' time.
"And I just wonder how much we'll learn from IVF and our growing acceptance of that technology when something really, for many people, weird might emerge in the future."
