“Growing up, whenever I met anyone else that was IVF, it felt like this cool little club of magic science babies.”
Ella-Joy Hunton was conceived by IVF and is turning 25 in the same year as Life. In 2025, she started working as a midwife, a field which has fascinated her since she was a child.
“I was a very, very inquisitive child,” Ella-Joy explains. “I asked a lot of questions and very early on I knew I wasn’t made the way that other babies were made.”
She always enjoyed having that point of difference, even if at that age she didn’t immediately grasp the process.
“My understanding at first was that I was mixed in a bowl,” she says, “and then put into my mum, so I had images of a whisk. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then, growing up, I learned what IVF was and I was a proper little champion of it. ‘Yeah, I was actually made in a scientific centre.”
Ella-Joy’s father had a low sperm count, so the ICSI process was used, where a single sperm is injected into an egg. The process was only a few years old at the time, but is now a familiar one in mainstream imagery of IVF.
“I’ll be 25 at the same time as Life, which is quite exciting,” Ella-Joy says.
Ella-Joy studied music at Newcastle University, but after the pandemic wanted to do something different and took a master’s degree in midwifery, which she completed at the end of 2024.
She found her experience of growing up as an IVF baby gives her a useful perspective.
“I’ve actually had the opportunity to deliver babies that are IVF,” she says, “and to support caesarean sections with babies that are IVF, which is really, really lovely.”
“A lot of the parents that I meet when I’ve done antenatal appointments, and it’s an IVF pregnancy, and they’re really nervous,” Ella-Joy explains. “They’re absolutely petrified, but meeting someone that’s a success story from it makes their shoulders sort of go down and go ‘okay, this does work’.”
Despite that anxiety, Ella-Joy thinks the conversation around IVF has changed since she was born.
“When my mum got me implanted, got the egg implanted, there was a protest going on outside saying that monsters were made there, to which she has forever said ‘oh, yeah, turns out they were right!’”
Much of the stigma has now evaporated, and there are far more positive media depictions of IVF.
Watching the dramatisation Joy, about the first test tube baby, Ella-Joy and her family discovered she was Louise Joy Brown, mirroring Ella’s own hyphenate.
The same story was also the subject of a play called A Child of Science, starring Harry Potter actor Tom Felton.
“I went to see that on my 24th birthday,” Ella-Joy says, “and I got to meet the cast, and that was really exciting. They were really excited to meet an actual IVF baby on her birthday.”
“It’s a really nice bit of my origin story, really. It feels a little bit like a Marvel superhero because you’re not quite the same.”
Ella-Joy has also lived next to Life for the past four years, and drawn strength – especially after long shifts or with uni work stacking up – from walking through the site and seeing the building she came from.
“I walked past Life and I was like, ‘hey, if I can become a blastocyst outside of the womb, I can do anything!’,” she explains.
During her training, Ella-Joy had midwifery placements across the North East.
“It’s such a hard job because you have to have so much confidence in what you’re doing and so much evidence to back it up,” she says of being a midwife.
“But, it’s such a privilege,” she continues. “Such a privilege. And I do think being IVF has shaped my way towards that because I’ve always had this sort of fascination with birth and how people got here and now I get to see it happen.”
When parents of IVF babies find out Ella-Joy was conceived by IVF they often have questions.
“The most common thing I get asked is how did your parents tell you?,” she says. “And I say, well, they were just open with me from day one, you know, if I asked, they told me, because you do start asking those questions.”
Ella-Joy refers to IVF mothers as “carrying precious cargo,” and says that even though IVF pregnancies aren’t any more risky after a certain point, that midwives do always add a note to the patient’s chart. Knowing a baby was desperately wanted changes how you speak to someone.
Her parents’ openness, and her mother in particular being an advocate for IVF, has informed Ella-Joy’s outlook and carried over into the support for her patients. It’s the same Ella-Joy now speaking to them who proudly told school friends where she came from.
“I’ve probably triggered several thousand children to go ‘mummy, how did I get here?’,” she jokes.
“I’m happy to be a science baby,” Ella-Joy concludes. “I’m happy to be part of that development of science. That’s incredible.”
Life is celebrating 25 years! We’ve been reminiscing about some of our favourite memories since we opened and would love to hear yours!
