A 26-year-old woman has given birth to a baby girl from a donated embryo which was frozen for 24 years – the longest ever frozen embryo to come to term, according to a report by Dailymail.
The woman identified as Tina Gibson named her baby Emma Wren. She was conceived and fertilized 24 years ago in 1992, but the embryo was frozen instead of implanted.
Tina, who was born in 1991, could not conceive naturally with her husband Benjamin, because he has cystic fibrosis, so they decided to adopt a frozen embryo from the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.
In March this year, the frozen embryo was thawed then transferred to Tina in an identical procedure to IVF.
On November 25, after a normal 40-week pregnancy with no issues, Tina gave birth naturally – with no drugs and a 24-hour labor – to Emma, who weighed six pounds and eight ounces, and measured 20 inches long.
Speaking to Daily Mail Online, Tina admits that she was taken aback when, on the morning of the transfer, she found out how long the embryo had been frozen.
‘Honestly my I was just really worried that it wouldn’t work,’ Tina said. ‘I was like “I don’t want a world record, I want a baby!” But Ben was completely intrigued by it.
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‘Then later it hit me when they were about to do the transfer. I said, “you know, I’m just 25… me and her, we could’ve been best friends.”‘Â
Tina and Benjamin met at church, and dated for most of Tina’s teens.
They got married seven years ago when Tina was 19 years old and Benjamin was 26, because Benjamin has cystic fibrosis (CF), a fatal respiratory disease with a life expectancy in the 30s, and they didn’t want to lose time.
Since fertility is often impossible or highly complicated for CF sufferers, they decided they would adopt. They started fostering children in 2015, which they enjoyed, hosting half a dozen children in one year.
In May, between fostering, they were about to go on a couple’s vacation, and Tina’s father came round to look after their dog. As they were about to leave, he told them he had just heard about embryo adoption on a news report, meaning they could adopt and have the experience of pregnancy.
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‘I said, that sounds neat dad but we’re really set on adoption,‘ Tina recalled.
‘Me and Ben had known ever since we started dating that if we were ever going to start a family, we wouldn’t be able to have our own children. We had made peace with that, we were happy and excited about adopting a child, and we had loved fostering. So I just said, neat but no.’
And yet, throughout the entire eight-hour car journey they were reeling. ‘Both of us couldn’t stop talking about it, thinking about it, imagining it,’ Tina said.
‘We watched every video, read every article… by the end of the trip we knew everything about it. But still, we decided at the end that we still wanted to do adoption, we didn’t know what this was, and we’d spent so long thinking about adoption.’
However, for the next three months, neither could get it out of their heads.
‘We weren’t talking about it, but I was thinking about it every day. Then one day I came home and we were eating dinner and I said “I think we need to do the embryo adoption”, and Ben said “I know, I’ve thought about it every day, I can’t get it out of my head”.’
After exploring their options, they decided they would adopt their embryo through the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, which has led to 700 pregnancies since 2003 – more than any other organization in the world.
As of December 2016, Tina was taking hormonal injections so she could try for a transfer.
In February, they started the procedure to select their embryo. They were given a book with dozens of potential profiles, listing details of the parents at the time of conception – their weight, height, age, skin color.
Whittling it down felt impossible, they said. ‘We really wanted to do it as soon as possible so were just tearing through them, trying to find anything that could be a no. We’re both short, so anyone over six foot was out. Things like that,’Â Tina said.
After selecting 10, they had to pick three, and put them in order. But their order didn’t work; all three need to have been frozen at similar times and been at similar stages of development. The center helped them rejig their selection, putting Emma first.
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‘I think it shows she was just meant to be ours,’Â Tina said.
As far as Emma was concerned, the pregnancy ran smoothly. The only hiccup came when doctors realized Tina had an unusually short cervix.
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‘We thought we might lose her,’ Benjamin explained. ‘It was scary. But Emma was perfect the whole time.’
On the day, Tina went through the entire birth naturally without drugs (‘I have no idea why I did that, it wasn’t for any particular reason and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone!’).
Now the family is preparing for their first Christmas together, in which they are planning on ‘just sitting and staring it her,’ according to Benjamin.
‘It is deeply moving and highly rewarding to see that embryos frozen 24-and-a-half years ago using the old, early cryopreservation techniques of slow freezing on day one of development at the pronuclear stage can result in 100 percent survival of the embryos with a 100 percent continued proper development to the day three embryo stage,’ Sommerfelt said.
‘I will always remember what the Gibsons said when presented with the picture of their embryos at the time of transfer: “These embryos could have been my best friends,” as Tina herself was only 25 at the time of transfer.’Â
Around 700,000 to over 1,000,000 human embryos are currently stored in the US.
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