One of the earliest Mississippi couples to conceive through IVF shares their story

Lynn slowly flips through a baby book with pictures of her twin daughters while sitting in her living room. 

“That's Susan,” Lynn said, squinting at a picture. “Let's see. Susan's the bigger one. So that's Susan. That's Mary.”

Lynn looks over at a painted portrait of the twins hanging on the wall.

“They were cute,” she said. “They were very cute.”

Lynn first met her husband Dick at the University of Mississippi. They went on their first date February 11, 1977.

“We got married in 1979 and started trying right away,” Lynn said. “I wanted babies in my 20s. I didn't want to be in my 30s and have children, because I wanted to be a young grandmother. Then I wanted to be a great grandmother. I kept thinking, I want all those years, but it just didn't happen.”

Lynn says uterus related problems as a teen contributed to her infertility. She later got surgery to correct the problem, but says years began to pass  without a successful pregnancy. 

“Being infertile is just, it's invisible,” she said. “People can't see it, except that they don't see a child.”

Lynn went through 24 rounds of artificial insemination. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 13% of women aged 15 - 49 in the U.S. experience difficulty getting pregnant. Lynn’s husband, Dick, says the threat of infertility was traumatic.

“You wait to the end of the cycle, hoping that you're pregnant and then if it doesn't work out then, you just cry,” he said, his voice breaking.

Still, in 1984, the couple felt a glimmer of hope.  

While attending an infertility support group, they became aware of a new treatment at the University of Mississippi Medical Center: in-vitro fertilization, popularly known as IVF. 

The IVF program was the first in the state and one of the first in the nation. Founder Dr. Bryan Cowan created the program at UMMC in 1983.

The Lawrences decided to be one of the first families to participate.

“I still remember the first time I went in for IVF, for my first appointment, where we had gone through the pre -check period where they evaluate you and make sure that you're qualified, that you are a good candidate for it,” Lynn said. “I met all the criteria. I didn't have anything that couldn't be overcome. I had several problems, but it wasn't anything that was insurmountable.”

IVF is a procedure that involves removing eggs from a woman's ovaries. The eggs are then fertilized outside of the woman’s body. If the resulting embryos reach a certain stage of development, they are transferred into a woman's uterus with the hope that it results in a pregnancy. 

“It was a neat time to be our age to be of childbearing, those years,” Lynn said. “On the cusp of such a huge frontier that was, I mean, it had just arrived into Mississippi. It was just arriving in the South. It was everything. So much in medicine was changing then. It was an exciting time to get pregnant.”

The Lawrence’s were told only three eggs could be retrieved from Lynn at a time. 

“I didn't think emotionally I could handle more than two, which was probably true,” she said.  

Lynn says she went through the lengthy IVF process twice. Neither worked. 

“We didn't want to hope because we knew that the odds are not in your favor for the first time, but it still hurt” she said. “So we planted some dogwood trees in our yard. We did that again for the second procedure too.”

Dr. John Rushing is the current director of the IVF program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. 

“The first thing I like to tell patients is that I have infertility myself and that's ultimately why I got into this field,” he said. “I knew the emotions of what those patients were going through because I had been through them personally with me and my wife. We required IVF for treatments.”

He says in the ‘80s, IVF only had a 20 to 30% success rate. Now, after vast improvements in IVF medications, Rushing says patients can expect 60 to 70% success rates in IVF treatments. He emphasizes, though, that it’s not possible to know exactly how many embryos each person will create or if they will be viable.

“Not all that do fertilize will make it to an embryo stage,” Rushing said. “Also, not all embryos will be capable of life.”

Rushing says the first Mississippi IVF baby was born in 1984 through the medical center's program. The following year, Dick and Lynn Lawrence went through their third round of IVF treatment at UMMC. Ten days later, Lynn went back to the doctor.

“It was a huge event,” she said. “We all looked, we saw two little sacks. Everybody just erupted. It was just like winning the Superbowl. It was just crazy and they were laughing and hugging and teasing me about having twins.”

Susan and Mary were born to the Lawrences in 1986. 

“We're like, those were little eggs,” Lynn said. 

IVF came to national attention in 2024. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos could be classified as children after an accident at a clinic in the state resulted in destroyed frozen embryos. The ruling halted IVF services in Alabama for a few weeks. 

Yet, Lynn says many of her family’s memories and rituals would not have existed if it weren’t for IVF.

“It's such a gift and, to me, not controversial,” she said. “I never saw it as being controversial because, I don't like to get political, but it's like going in having a heart procedure or having a pacemaker put in.”

Barbara Collura is the president and CEO of Resolve, an infertility association. She says how people view embryos, which can be potentially frozen or discarded, is at the core of the controversy surrounding IVF. 

“If somebody believes that that embryo is a person, then many of the things that happen in the IVF process become very, very difficult to even do because it may be viewed as homicide,” she said.

Still, Collura says IVF treatment may be able to help people live out a core aspect of their beliefs.

“For many people, the dream of parenthood, the dream of having children is who we are as human beings,” she said. “It's our ability to reproduce. It's our ability to have a family, and for most people, it's part of our human right, if you will, to live our lives and to be able to have families.”

IVF treatment received some support from the Trump administration after the president signed an executive order in February, seeking to explore ways to expand access. The average costs of IVF treatments can range from $12,000 to $25,000. According to the Mississippi Insurance Department, at least five major insurance providers in the state provide some form of coverage for IVF treatment. 

It is unclear how the Trump administration will proceed with their recommendations. A team researching IVF treatment was recently cut from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

IVF still remains one of the most popular reproductive treatments in the country. Nearly 2,000 babies have been born through the program at UMMC.

Back in Oxford, the Lawrence’s home is wrapped in reminders of their family life. The twins are featured prominently alongside another daughter. Lynn says her family was happily surprised three years after the twins were born with Ginny.

“I got pregnant the old fashioned way,” she said. “We did not know it could happen.”

Dick, Lynn’s husband, says it's all part of their legacy continuing.

“We’re all connected, and by all, I mean humanity and all people,” he said. “If you want to take the Buddhist approach, we can go even further than that.  We’re all part of the stardust out there. So that’s our way to be connected to the stardust after we’re gone.”

The Lawrence's now have four grandchildren, two from each twin daughter.