Embryo frozen for 27 years: as a couple they chose the baby who broke the record | Wellness

Your embryo froze in October 1992, and stayed that way until February 2020when Tina and Ben Gibson from Tennessee adopted her.

Molly is believed to have established a new record for the longest frozen embryo which resulted in a birth, breaking a record set by her older sister, Emma.

“We are in the clouds,” said Tina Gibson. “I’m still excited.”

“If you had asked me five years ago if I would not have just one girl, but two, I would have said it was crazy,” he said.

The family battled infertility for nearly five years until Tina’s parents saw a story about embryo adoption on a local news radio.

“That’s the only reason we share our story. If my parents hadn’t seen it on the news, we wouldn’t be here,” says Tina, 29. “I feel like we should complete a cycle.”

Tina, an elementary school teacher, and her husband, a 36-year-old cybersecurity analyst, contacted the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC), a Christian non-profit organization in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. .

The institution stores frozen embryos that IVF patients have decided not to use and have decided to donate.

Families like Gibson’s can adopt one of the unused embryos and give birth to a child who is not genetically linked to them. There are currently about a million frozen human embryos stored in the US, according to the NEDC.

Mark Mellinger, director of marketing and development at NEDC, says the experience with infertility is common among families seeking embryo donations.

“I would say that probably 95% have some form of infertility,” he says. “We are honored and privileged to do this job and help couples start their families.”

After the adoption of the first embryo, Tina gave birth to Emma in 2017, exchanging the sleepless nights she spent praying for the children for the sleepless nights of motherhood. “It’s the best kind of exhaustion and the best kind of exhaustion,” he said.

Founded 17 years ago, NEDC has facilitated more than 1,000 embryo adoptions and births, and now performs around 200 transfers each year. As in a traditional adoption process, couples can decide whether they want a “closed” or “open” embryo adoption, allowing some form of contact with the donor’s family.

That contact ranges from a few emails a year to a “cousin” relationship, Mellinger says.

Couples are presented with profiles of 200 to 300 donors, along with the demographic history of the donor’s family. The Gibsons thought they faced too many options.

“We don’t care what this baby looks like, where it comes from”says Tina. She sought advice from the NEDC, where an official told her to take whatever criteria to select the donor, even if it was silly criteria, and go from there.

“My husband and I are short people, so we narrowed down the options using height and weight as criteria, looking for something like us. That has been reduced a lot,” she says.

Gibson’s daughters, Molly and Emma,they are genetic sisters. The two embryos were donated and frozen together in 1992, when Tina Gibson was about a year old. According to NEDC, Emma’s 24-year-old embryo had the previous birth record of an embryo frozen long ago until it was overtaken by Molly’s this year.

Emma loves her new baby sister, says Tina. “She introduces anyone who sees her as ‘my little sister Molly.’ And Tina says she loved seeing the similarities between her girls, like a little crease between their eyebrows when they’re angry or upset.

According to the NEDC, the lifespan of frozen embryos is, in theory, infinite, so that record may be broken in the future. But the technology has been around for a few decades: The first baby born from a frozen embryo after IVF birth was in Australia in 1984.

“It’s perfectly possible that a baby will be born from a 30-year-old embryo one day,” says Mellinger.

VIDEOS: G1 most viewed in recent days