The baby of a couple from the American state of Ohio has been born from an embryo that has been frozen for more than thirty years. The healthy boy is being called the “oldest baby in the world.”
Never before has a child been born from such an old embryo, writes MIT Technology Review. The previous record dates from 2022, when twins were born from an embryo that was frozen in 1992.
Despite the difficult birth last weekend, mother and child are doing well. The couple had been trying to have a child for more than seven years before switching to IVF. In IVF, an egg is fertilized outside the body with sperm and then placed in the uterus.
The new parents ended up at an adoption agency for embryos and adopted one from 62-year-old Linda Archered. She had been trying to get pregnant for six years when in 1994 she decided to freeze four embryos. One of those embryos gave birth to her daughter a year later. Archered’s daughter is now thirty years old.
Archered had the other embryos stored in a lab all those years, because she might want another child someday. It cost her thousands of dollars a year to keep them there. After she went through menopause, she decided to donate the embryos to an adoption agency. That way she could still experience her embryo growing into a child.
The new parents describe the birth of their son as “something out of a science fiction movie.” “Our baby has a sister who is already thirty years old and the father was still a toddler when the embryo was frozen.” They say they weren’t out to break a record. “We just really wanted a child.”