Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader Read Online Free PDF Page A

was best known for her award-winning Broadway performances in South Pacific, Peter Pan , and The Sound of Music. A 1976 life-size bronze statue by Ronald Thomason stands outside the Weather-ford Public Library in Martin’s hometown of Weatherford, Texas. Martin was the mother of actor Larry Hagman, Dallas ’s J. R. Ewing of “Who shot J.R.?” fame.
    Sacajawea (c. 1787–1812), the famed Shoshone guide and interpreter for the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1805, carried her infant son on her back during the journey. She has no fewer than eight statues dedicated to her in the United States. The most famous is theheroic bronze monument by the sculptor Alice Cooper at the Portland, Oregon, Washington Park, erected in 1905. You can also find statues of her on the grounds of:
    •The North Dakota State Capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota;
    •The Bozeman Tourist Information Bureau in Bozeman, Montana;
    •Pioneer Park in Lewiston, Idaho;
    •Central Wyoming College in Riverton, Wyoming;
    •Breaker’s Point in Cannon Beach, Oregon;
    •Sacajawea Interpretive Center, Sacajawea State Park, in Pasco, Washington; and
    •On Sacajawea Street in Portland, Oregon.
    So many honors for such an important lady! Sounds like a Sacajawea road trip is in order!
    Sacajawea Becomes a Mother
    “One of the women . . . halted at a little run about a mile behind us . . . I inquired of Cameahwait the cause of her detention, and was informed by him in an unconcerned manner that she had halted to bring forth a child and would soon overtake us; in about an hour the woman arrived with her newborn babe and passed us on her way to camp apparently as well as she ever was.”
—Meriwether Lewis, The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter
    Mrs. Brown changes the way women have babies.
    I n 1977, Lesley Brown was a frustrated young woman in Bristol, England. For nine years, she and her husband, John, had been unsuccessfully trying to have a baby. They had gone from doctor to doctor, searching for help, but had found none. Lesley (like about 20 percent of infertile women) had blocked fallopian tubes, which in those days meant that there was no hope of her ever conceiving a child. Luckily, she was referred to a special gynecologist, Dr. Patrick Steptoe.
FALLOPIAN TUBE 101
    Conception occurs when an egg cell (ovum) is released from a woman’s ovary and travels through a fallopian tube, where it is fertilized by male sperm, becomes an embryo, and travels into the uterus, to which it attaches and where it grows into a baby. When the fallopian tube is blocked, the eggs can’t travel through the tube to be fertilized.
    Still, hopeless as her situation seemed, after talking to Dr. Steptoe at Oldham General Hospital, Lesley felt a surge of hope. Steptoe, along with Dr. Robert Edwards of Cambridge University, had been experimenting with a way to fertilize the egg in a lab’s glass petri dish, a process called in vitro (in glass) fertilization, or IVF. So far, theprocess had yet to make a woman pregnant, but the doctors hoped that Lesley would be the first success.
    She knew it might be painful and could easily end in failure, but Lesley felt she had to grasp at what she saw as her last hope. On November 10, 1977, Lesley Brown took the first step in the process. Using a laparoscope, Dr. Steptoe removed an egg from one of Lesley’s ovaries. Dr. Edwards put Lesley’s egg in a laboratory dish that already contained John’s sperm. After the egg was fertilized, it was placed in a special solution created to nurture it while it divided. Two and a half days later, the newly fertilized egg was placed into Lesley’s uterus.
FICTION BECOMES SCIENCE
    Lesley was overjoyed as she began to experience what seemed to be a perfectly ordinary pregnancy. But as each month passed without incident, controversy swirled around the woman from Bristol. The fears concerning Lesley’s pregnancy and the process of in vitro fertilization became more and more