The National Embryo Donation Center in the United States believes that the babies were born as a result of the longest storage of embryos in the world. CNN reported that the embryos were initially created for an anonymous couple using IVF and stored in a fertility lab before being donated to a national center in 2007. In 1992, the biological mother, the egg donor, was 34, while the father was about 50. years.
For nearly three decades, embryos have been stored in a warehouse on tiny straws kept in liquid nitrogen at around minus 200 degrees. The embryos were stored at a fertility lab on the West Coast until 2007, when the couple who created them donated them to the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. They hoped someone else would use them. So it happened.
“The eldest among the youngest children.” The embryos were frozen for 30 years
The proud new parents described it as an “amazing” experience. “I was five years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy and he has kept that life ever since,” said Philip Ridgway, father of the twins. “In a way, they’re our oldest children, even though they’re our youngest,” Philip and Rachel Ridgway said of their youngest children. And in an interview with CNN, the couple admitted that building a family is part of their greater calling.
“We didn’t want to have the embryos that were frozen the longest in the world,” said Philip Ridgway. When searching for donors, Ridgeways specifically asked the center to select a special category which meant that it was difficult to find a particular group of embryos recipients for various reasons.
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The couple has four other children, ranging in age from two to eight. None of them were born via IVF.
“We have never thought about a specific number of children we would like to have,” Philip said. “We always thought we were going to get what God wanted for us, and… when we heard about embryo adoption, we thought that was something we wanted to do,” he said.
Five embryos were thawed on 28 February. Of the five that were thawed, two were not viable. Experts say that when embryos are thawed, the survival rate is about 80 percent. The doctor recommended IVF with two fetuses because multiple births can cause complications in the pregnancy. When Rachel saw the picture of the three fetuses, she cried and said, “You just showed me my three babies. I want them all.” Two out of three conversions are successful. Rachel got pregnant on the 2nd of March. The children were born on October 31 of this year. They were the right weight.
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