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 whom they donate their embryos to.
Archerd had a preference for her embryo to be 'adopted' by a white, Christian married couple, leading to the Pierces adopting the embryo.
'We had a rough birth, but we're both doing well now,' Lindsey said. 'He is so chill. We are in awe that we have this precious baby.'
Archerd said: 'The first thing that I noticed when Lindsey sent me his pictures is how much he looks like my daughter when she was a baby. I pulled out my baby book and compared them side by side, and there is no doubt that they are siblings.'
The fertility clinic that implanted the embryo is run by John Gordon, a reproductive endocrinologist and reformed presbyterian who is working to reduce the number of embryos in storage.
Speaking of the embryo transfer, Gordon said: 'We have certain guiding principles, and they're coming from our faith. Every embryo deserves a chance at life and that the only embryo that cannot result in a healthy baby is the embryo not given the opportunity to be transferred into a patient.'
In the UK the proportion of IVF births has increased from 1.3% in 2000 to 3.1% in 2023, the equivalent of one in 32 UK births, roughly one child in every classroom.
For women aged 40 to 44, 11% of UK births were a result of IVF, up from 4% in 2000, accounting for 0.5% of all births, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (HFEA). In the US, about 2% of births are from IVF.
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