On October 31, Rachel and Philip Ridgway gave birth to Lydia and Timothy – two adorable babies born as a result of embryo freezing that was conducted about thirty years ago.
In April of 1992, two embryos were created in the laboratory for an anonymous married couple, through in vitro fertilization. The husband was in his early 50s and the two were helped by a 34-year-old egg donor. The embryos were frozen on April 22 of that year, and for almost three decades, they were kept in liquid nitrogen at almost 200 degrees below zero.
The embryos were kept in a fertility lab until 2007, when the anonymous couple who wanted to create them decided to donate them to the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the hope that another couple could use them. A little over a year ago, the Ridgway couple contacted the center with a request for a donation “and from there the rest is history”, the two said.
The medical term for the operation performed by Rachel and Philip is called “embryo donation”. There are couples who may produce extra embryos, and these embryos can be kept frozen for future use, to contribute to research to advance reproductive science or for people who are unable to have children. “We never planned how many children we would have, we always thought there would be as many as there would be and when we heard that there was a possibility to donate embryos, we decided to go for it,” said Philip. As with any other human tissue donation, the couple will have to meet the standards of the US Food and Drug Administration, including testing for certain infectious diseases.
As part of the application for the donation, the Ridgways listed the desired characteristics on them which included ethnicity, age, height, weight, genetic history, education, occupation and hobbies. In addition, they also asked to see photos of the donors and their children if any. After being selected for them, those embryos that were frozen somewhere in 1992 – were thawed on February 28, and out of five, two were not viable.
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, there is about an 80 percent survival rate when thawing frozen embryos, and the recommendation is to thaw one embryo at a time. The remaining three embryos were fertilized in Rachel’s womb on March 2 – 29 years and 10 months after they were frozen – and two of them were successfully absorbed. Lydia was born with a weight of 2.31 kg and Timothy with a weight of 3.01 kg. “They were born perfect. It’s really a great miracle that only strengthened us from the day they were born,” Rachel concluded.
“There’s something crazy about it,” Phillip said as he and his wife hugged the newborns at their home in Portland, Oregon. “I was five years old when Lydia and Timothy were created in the laboratory. In a way, they are our oldest children, even though they are our youngest,” added the father. The couple has four other children together, ages 8, 6, 3, and almost 2 years old, all of whom are their biological children.