World’s ‘oldest baby’ born from embryo frozen in 1994
Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July in Ohio to Lindsey and Tim Pierce, using an “adopted” embryo from Linda Archerd, 62, from more than 30 years ago.
In the early 1990s, Archerd and her then husband decided to try in vitro fertilisation (IVF) after struggling to become pregnant. In 1994 four embryos resulted: one was transferred to Archerd and resulted in the birth of a daughter, who is now 30 and mother to a 10-year-old. The other embryos were cryopreserved and stored.
“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” Lindsey told the MIT Technology Review, which first reported the story. “We just wanted to have a baby.”
IVF is a type of fertility treatment where eggs are retrieved from a woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory setting. The resulting embryos are then transferred back into the womb. The embryos can also be frozen and stored for future use.
Archerd was awarded custody of the embryos after divorcing her husband. She then found out about embryo “adoption”, a type of embryo donation in which both donors and recipients have a say in who receives the embryos.
