Parents have welcomed the “oldest” set of twins who were born from embryos that were frozen three decades ago.
Philip and Rachel expanded their family back in October when they welcomed twins Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway.
Their family, however, is far from the usual. As the couple explained, the one-month-old twins are, in a way, older than their four siblings, whereas they were frozen as embryos back in 1992, thirty years ago.
In the process, the family has likely broken a world record, whereas experts believe no other embryo before was frozen for such a long period before coming to life.
According to the reports, the embryos were frozen in 1992 by an anonymous couple using an egg donor. In 2007, the married couple decided to donate the embryos to the National Embryo Donation Center where they were stored in liquid nitrogen at -200F for many more years before the Ridgeways adopted them.
Admitting that the birth of their twins was “mind-boggling,” Philip and Rachel explained that they wanted to adopt embryos with the earliest donor dates because they had been waiting the longest time.
“We weren’t looking to get the embryos that have been frozen the longest in the world. We just wanted the ones that had been waiting the longest,” Oregon-based Philip said.
“I was five years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since. In a sense, they’re our oldest children, even though they’re our smallest children.”
Speaking out about the miracle birth was also the couple’s doctor, Dr James Gordon, who said: “If you’re frozen at nearly 200 degrees below zero, I mean, the biological processes essentially slow down to almost nothing.
“And so perhaps the difference between being frozen for a week, a month, a year, a decade, two decades, it doesn’t really matter.”
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