Vietnam’s First IVF Babies Were Born in 1998, and Now One of Them, Luu Tuyet Tran, Has Become a Mother at 28
On April 30, 1998, three babies were born on the same day at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. They were the first children in Vietnam conceived through in vitro fertilization. The last of the three to arrive, at 9 a.m., was a girl named Luu Tuyet Tran.
On Nov. 4, 2026, at 11:15 a.m., Tran gave birth to her own first child, a boy weighing 3,150 grams, or about 6 pounds, 15 ounces, by cesarean section at My Duc Hospital in the same city, Tuoi Tre News reported. She is 28. “Both mother and baby are doing very well,” hospital director Ho Manh Tuong told the newspaper.
The Last of Three
Tran’s parents, Luu Tan Luc and Tran Thi Bach Tuyet, had struggled with infertility before she was born. According to Tuoi Tre, her mother was told one of her fallopian tubes was blocked, and about a month later she was invited to join one of Vietnam’s earliest IVF programs.
The other two babies born that April morning were Mai Quoc Bao and Pham Tuong Lan Thy. Lan Thy’s middle name honors the doctors behind the program: it combines the names of Ho Manh Tuong and Vuong Thi Ngoc Lan, the newspaper reported.
Twenty-eight years later, the same names appear in Tran’s story again. Tuong now runs My Duc Hospital, where her son was born. Lan is a vice president of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City. And Professor Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, the former Tu Du director who performed the 1998 procedure with Lan, cared for Tran at her own birth.
Tran told Tuoi Tre she is grateful to the doctors who brought her into the world and gave her what she called a miraculous life. The newspaper did not say how her son was conceived.
A Program Built From Donations and Savings
Vietnam’s first IVF births came after more than a decade of work by Phuong. In a September profile by VietNamNet, the paper reported that she first learned about IVF on a work trip to Thailand in 1984, years after the procedure had begun in the United Kingdom in 1978. She gathered equipment through donations from international delegations and by buying pieces in France with her own savings.
Tu Du Hospital received permission to perform IVF on Aug. 19, 1997, and carried out its first procedure that day. The trial that followed included 36 couples. Eleven of the women became pregnant and gave birth, VietNamNet reported, and three of those babies arrived together the following April.
That 36-couple trial grew quickly. Tu Du had delivered more than 16,300 IVF babies by its 25th anniversary in 2023, the Vietnam News Agency reported through VietnamPlus, and was seeing about 55,000 to 60,000 infertility check-ups a year. By early 2024, the hospital’s director, Dr. Tran Ngoc Hai, put the total at more than 17,000, and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health said more than 150,000 children nationwide had been born with assisted reproduction, mostly IVF, according to SGGP.
Full Circle at My Duc
IVF itself is less than 50 years old, which is why stories like Tran’s are only now beginning to appear. The children of the first programs are reaching the ages when people start families of their own.
For Vietnam, Tran’s son marks that turn. Tuoi Tre’s video report on Nov. 5 framed it simply: one of the country’s first IVF babies has become a mother herself.
Parent Diaries has followed IVF families at every stage, from the mom whose last embryo transfer brought a surprise on the ultrasound to the Brooklyn court case over a second frozen embryo. Tran’s story is the other end of that road: a child of IVF holding a child of her own, in a hospital run by one of the doctors who made her birth possible.
Get stories like this by email. Sign up for The Parent Diaries Letter.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Karel Bilek – CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
