• Question: what is a test tube baby

    Asked by diddy01 to Alberto, Chris, Emmanuel, Jennie, Michelle on 15 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Chris Whittle

      Chris Whittle answered on 15 Jun 2013:

      A test tube baby is a baby that has come from fertilising the egg outside the womb, which is often used for women and men who cannot fertilise the egg naturally, often because of infertility. The fertilised egg is then inserted back into the womb where it grows like any other baby would do.

    • Photo: Alberto Lapedriza

      Alberto Lapedriza answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      Men and woman that cannot conceive a baby naturally because they have some problem with their reproductive system can still do it by using the technique called in vitro fertilisation. With this technique the embryo is produced in the lab, outside the woman’s body. Doctors get an egg cell from the mother, and they put it together with sperm they get from the father in a Petri dish, which is essentially a small plastic dish that is sterile and it is commonly used in the lab. There, the egg cell is fertilised by the sperm, and then doctors transfer the embryo to the woman’s womb, where it develops like a normal embryo, and it becomes a baby. The babies produced using this technique are colloquially called “test tube babies”. However, the embryos are produced in a Petri dish instead of in a test tube, so the name is not really accurate.

    • Photo: Emmanuel Amabebe

      Emmanuel Amabebe answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      A testube baby is one whose fertilization was artificially carried out outside the woman’s reproductive tract(fallopian tube), in a testube before implementation into the uterus. It is also called invitro fertilization (IVF).

    • Photo: Michelle Taylor

      Michelle Taylor answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      ‘Test-tube baby’ is what journalists call a baby that was made in a laboratory rather than inside a woman’s body. As some of the other scientists have rightly said it is when an egg from Mum and sperm from Dad are joined together within a small petri dish – the embryo is then put back inside Mum to continue growing as usual. Unfortunately ‘Petri dish baby’ doesn’t sound as great on the front of a newspaper!

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