Lisa Forman Cody

Lisa Forman Cody is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (2005). She’s currently writing a book about the history of marriage, the law, and concepts of human rights.


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Writing on Public Books

“Test-Tube Babies” @40

Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge embryologist Robert Edwards, and a large medical team, together with a BBC film crew, had secretly gathered in the operating theater of Oldham Hospital in Manchester. Admitted […]