An American woman has given birth to a third, healthy triplet 13 years after the first two were delivered. Debbie Beasley’s youngest daughter, Laina, was born five months ago after spending 13 years in a freezer chilled to -235C.
As if the odds against her developing into a normal baby were not overwhelming enough, Laina also survived her mother’s near-fatal reaction to the fertility drug Lupon and an eight-hour drive across the baking Californian desert while she was still a two-celled embryo. Beasley and her husband, Kent, had chosen the name Laina because it means God’s gift.
”Every day I hold her, look at her and gaze at her beautiful blue eyes,” Beasley (45) said from her home in San Francisco on Tuesday night. ”I still can’t believe it. I was absolutely overwhelmed when she was born. I heard her scream and I started to cry and then I held her in my arms and I was filled with joy.”
Debbie and Kent Beasley each had children from previous marriages when they met in the late 1980s, but soon discovered they could not start a family together.
They embarked on a course of IVF treatment at UC Irvine in California in which Mrs Beasley’s eggs were treated with drugs, harvested and fertilised with her husband’s sperm. Some of the eggs were then placed into her fallopian tube. As the procedure offered only a 50% chance of success, the Beasleys had 12 additional embryos frozen for later use.
The treatment was successful and Beasley fell pregnant with triplets in 1992. She lost one during the pregnancy, but her twins, Jeffrey and Carleigh were born healthy.
In 1995, the Beasleys discovered that the specialist who had treated them, Dr Ricardo Asch, had been taking eggs and embryos from his patients and putting them in other women or sending them to other research scientists.
They found out that Asch had taken dozens of Mrs Beasley’s eggs, and, after suing the clinic and UC Irvine, they managed to recover eight of the 12 embryos they had originally decided to use during the treatment.
Despite being ”devastated” when they learned that four of their embryos had been given away, the couple decided in 1996 that they were ready to try for another baby. Having made up their minds, they put their four-year-old twins in the back of their car and drove to the fertility clinic where their remaining embryos were stored in freezers.
Beasley describes the eight-hour journey through the Californian desert as the most important drive of her life. ”Jeffrey and Carleigh were barely four years old when we put them in the back of the car. They didn’t really understand what was going on but our 11-year-old daughter was with us and she had a better understanding,” said Mrs Beasley.
”We told the twins it was very important to get the embryos home quickly and to keep them safe. We couldn’t let the containers get hotter than 75 degrees and it was 90 degrees outside.”
Two of the embryos were then thawed and implanted in her womb. During the second bout of treatment, she was given the fertility drug Lupron, which sent her into anaphylactic shock and almost killed her. She lost the two embryos she had been carrying. Nevertheless — and despite being seriously ill — she remained determined to have another baby.
Seven years later, she had another go at getting pregnant and went to a fertility specialist in San Francisco.
On February 4 this year — five weeks premature but weighing 6lbs 4oz — Laina was born. – Guardian Unlimited Â