Emma Gibson was conceived in 1992 but not born until 2017.
Gibson, born November 25, was frozen as an embryo and donated to a Knoxville faith-based clinic that specializes in embryo donation and adoption, doctors and her parents said.
“Do you realize that I’m 25 years old? If the baby was born when it was supposed to born, we could have been best friends,” Emma’s mother, Tina Gibson, told local NBC affiliate WBIR.
“I think she looks pretty perfect to have been frozen all those years ago,” Emma’s dad, Benjamin Gibson, said in a statement.
While it’s not possible to know if the birth is a record, it’s likely close, the clinic’s president and medical director, according to Dr. Jeffrey Keenan.
“We had our medical library, which is very good at finding things, look to see if they could find anything older than that and they could not,” Keenan, who performed the embryo transfer, told NBC News.
“But it is kind of neat that this embryo was conceived just a year or so before the mother was.”
Fertility clinic records are private and there are no official databases on the ages of embryos when transferred to a woman’s uterus. But outside experts said it’s possible Emma’s birth set a record.
It’s a claim that difficult to verify, said Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
“These are not the kind of claims that are generally made in peer-reviewed scientific publications. They are typically the kind of claims that are made by marketers,” he said.
“I think it is probably fair to say if it is not the oldest, it would be among the oldest,” said Dr. David Adamson, CEO of Arc Fertility in San Jose, California.
“I’m not personally aware of a medical report where an older embryo has resulted in a live birth.”
Emma would have been conceived a year and a half before her mother, Tina Gibson, was born.
“I think it makes it all that much more of a miracle,” Tina Gibson said.
Not that it matters, the experts agreed.
“Medically, the amount of time an embryo is frozen is not very important,” Tipton said.
“The babies are the same,” Adamson said. “Overall, IVF babies do very well. Over all, the frozen embryos do just as well as the fresh embryos.”
The risks all come at the moment of thawing out the embryo, Keenan and Adamson both said. If an embryo survives being thawed out, then it’s no less likely than any other embryo to result in a healthy pregnancy.
Photo courtesy of WBIR
