After 28 years of deep freeze baby Molly’s birth sets record
For Molly Gibson the past three decades are a story of what might have been.
The embryo she grew from was frozen 28 years ago and could have been carried to term at any point since then.
Instead she was born five weeks ago, on October 26, setting what is believed to be a new record for the longest interval between embryo-freezing and birth.
The previous mark was set by her sister and genetic sibling Emma, whose embryo was donated and frozen together with Molly’s on October 14, 1992. Their future mother, Tina Gibson, was a year old at the time.
While Emma and Molly spent most of the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s in cold storage, Tina Gibson, now 29, grew up, married and spent years praying for a baby while she and husband Ben,
36, struggled with infertility. The devoutly Christian couple then learnt about frozen embryo ‘‘adoption’’. The process is cheaper than in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and also more morally acceptable to people who believe that life begins at fertilisation and rule out IVF because the process often yields spare embryos.
Gibson gave birth to Emma in
2017, calling her ‘‘a gift from the Lord, for sure’’, and found out that she was pregnant with Molly in March this year.
‘‘She has definitely been a little spark of joy for 2020,’’ she told CNN. ‘‘Here we go again with another world record.’’
Both pregnancies were made possible by the National Embryo Donation Centre in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the Gibsons live. For embryo adoption to take place, couples who have IVF or laboratory conception donate their unused embryos to couples that cannot conceive. The embryos are frozen until a match is found. They are then transferred to the uterus of a woman who subsequently gives birth to a child that is not biologically related to her or her partner.
About 75 per cent of all donated embryos survive the thawing and transfer process, and between 25 and 30 per cent of implants prove successful, the NEDC has said.
Embryo adoption accounted for only a tiny fraction of the more than 2 million transfers of embryos to women’s uteruses recorded in the United States between 2000 and 2016.
But the practice is gaining popularity rapidly: in that time period the number of donor transfers rose from 334 to 1940, according to figures compiled by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s leading public health agency.