Record-breaking "oldest" twin babies born
The world's "oldest" twin babies have been born more than 30 years after being frozen as embryos.
They could well be the longest-frozen embryos to ever result in a live birth, according to official records.
Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway were welcomed into the world on October 31st 2022, three decades after the embryos were created for an anonymous married couple using IVF on April 22nd 1992.
Lydia and Timothy's parents, Philip and Rachel, were never expecting to set a record as their fifth and sixth children were born.
"We liked the idea that we are saving lives that are trapped,” Philip, 35 and a software developer, told The New York Post.
The couple chose the oldest available option from National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC), a Knoxville, Tennessee, non-profit that provides donated embryos to couples wanting kids.
“We knew basic information [about the genetic parents] such as height and weight, but we weren’t using that [as criteria] how we were going to choose,” said Rachel, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom near Portland, Oregon.
But they were more interested in, as Rachel put it, “How long have {the embryos} been waiting — which ones were waiting for parents to come and get them?”
“When we went into this process, we wanted to find the embryos that were overlooked or most unwanted,” Rachel said. “We were looking for embryos that needed a home because they had been overlooked.”
The process is sometimes referred to as “embryo adoption”, and is a recent phenomenon within the Evangelical Christian community in the Unites States.
“The idea of giving birth to your adopted child was fantastic to me,” said Rachel.
Philip would have been five years old when the embryos were first frozen, to put their age into perspective.
"There is something mind-boggling about it," Philip told CNN.
Image credits: The Ridgeway family