Record-breaking twins born from 30 year old frozen embryos
Twins Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway entered the Guinness Book of Records for being overdue babies – by a staggering 30 years! OK, they weren’t technically inside a mother’s womb for three decades waiting to be born. They were 30 year old frozen embryos, which broke a world record for the longest-frozen embryos to ever result in a live birth.
CNN reported that the parents of six, Philip and Rachel Ridgeway, welcomed the two new members to their family on October 31. They were born in the United States, in Portland, Oregon. Lydia weighed 2.5 kilogrammes when she was born, and Timothy weighed in at 3 kilograms.
The Ridgeways explained that they had four children, three daughters and one son, together and planned to have more kids. They wanted to participate in the embryo adoption programme and desired to seek out the embryos that have been waiting for parents for a long time.
Rachel told the media that…
“We wanted to be able to go in and find embryos that had been overlooked for reasons beyond their control that have been waiting so long for a mom and a dad.”
Philip added…
“There is something mind-boggling about it. I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since.
“In a sense, they’re our oldest children, even though they’re our smallest children.”
The Ridgeways have four other children, aged 8, 6, 3 and almost 2, none conceived via IVF or donors.
According to the National Embryo Donation Center, the embryos of Lydia and Timothy were donated by an anonymous married couple using In-vitro Fertilization (IVF).
The husband was in his early 50s, and they used a 34-year-old egg donor.
The embryos were frozen on April 22, 1992.
For nearly three decades, they sat in storage on tiny straws kept in liquid nitrogen at nearly 200 degrees below zero, in a device that looks much like a propane tank.
The twins took the world record from the previous owner, Molly Gibson, who was born from a nearly 27 year old embryo in 2020.
