The child could have been born in 1993 but its first experience of the world came 13 years later, or nine months after an embryo was pulled out of the freezer at a Spanish fertility clinic.
The clinic in Barcelona is claiming the world record for having brought about the birth of what could be termed the world’s oldest baby. Conceived in a laboratory dish, but not used at the time, the embryo sat at -196 degrees Celsius in a freezer cabinet awaiting its adoptive parents.
The original parents had donated the fertilised egg to the Instituto Marqués clinic after a sibling was born from a separate embryo successfully implanted in the mother’s womb. In the meantime, the baby has missed the first 13 birthday parties of a sibling who, under other circumstances, might have been considered a non-identical twin.
The child’s delayed entry into the world means it also missed three general elections in Spain, as well as everything from the formal creation of the European Union to the release of Kurt Cobain’s last album with Nirvana, In Utero.
On the scientific level, the birth has proved that frozen fertilised eggs — which are usually referred to as embryos but are technically pre-embryos — can survive for much longer than the five-year restriction in some countries. In Britain there is almost always a 10-year limit. If the child had been born in Britain it would have had the right, under the terms of a law passed in April last year, to find out who its genetic parents were. Under Spanish law the child does not have that right.
It was not revealed on Friday whether the embryo had been implanted into a Spanish woman or to any of the British or other foreign couples who travel to the Instituto Marqués for in-vitro fertilisation treatment.
The fertilised egg was one of six created by the genetic parents, three of which were used in the original treatment. The three others were put up for adoption and at least one was accepted by the new couple. It was not clear on Friday whether any of the remaining fertilised eggs were still in the clinic’s freezer cabinet .
Doctors MarÃÂa Luisa López-Teijón and Juan Alvarez are to publish a report on the birth in the Cambridge-based Reproductive Bio Medicine journal in December. The journal has already made preliminary information available to online subscribers.
The doctors would not discuss the case on Friday, but a representative of the clinic confirmed details published in the Spanish press. The doctors have called a press conference for next week.
An estimated half-a-million frozen embryos, almost all of them left over from in-vitro treatment, are being kept in the US alone. The previous record for a successfully implanted embryo was 12 years.
Doctors recently coined the term ”the embryo dilemma” to express the difficulty many parents of embryos have when it comes to giving instructions for them to be thawed and, in effect, disposed of.
”Until recently, I don’t know if any of us were aware of the scope of the embryo dilemma,” Robert Nachtigall, an endocrinologist, told last year’s meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. ”For many couples, it seems there is no good decision; yet they still take it seriously morally.”
”Parents variously conceptualised frozen embryos as biological tissue, living entities, ‘virtual’ children having interests that must be considered and protected, siblings of their living children, genetic or psychological ‘insurance policies’, and symbolic reminders of their past infertility,” he wrote in the society’s journal, Fertility and Sterility, last year. — Guardian Unlimited Â