The couple had twins from eggs that were frozen in 1992 – news Urix – Utenriksnyheter og -documentarer

Most births are special for those involved. But this birth is a little out of the ordinary. On 31 October 2022, two children were born in the American city of Portland after waiting for their turn for 30 years. – I was five years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he has preserved that life ever since, he says. – In a way, they are our oldest children, even if they are our youngest children. According to the National Embryo Donation Center, the birth is historic. Never have fertilized eggs been frozen for so long to result in a live birth, writes CNN. – We weren’t looking to get the eggs that have been frozen the longest, emphasizes the twins’ father, Philip Ridgeway. – We only wanted those who had waited the longest, he says. A proud couple just after birth. The children were born 30 years after the fertilized eggs were frozen. Photo: NATIONAL EMBRYO DONATION CENTER / HANDOUT HANDOUT / EPA Donated eggs The story of the twin pair is now making headlines around the world. The story begins on 22 April 1992. Then the fertilized eggs were frozen. Rachel and Philip Ridgeway were just three and five years old when their twins were ‘conceived’ by an anonymous couple using IVF. But five eggs were never used by the couple. So the couple eventually donated them to the National Embryo Donation Center in Tennessee in the hope that they would be used by someone else. For almost three decades, these eggs lay dormant before Lydia and Timothy came into the world. The center behind this is a private and Christian-led organisation, which requires recipients to pass a “family assessment”. According to CNN, one of the requirements is that couples must be biologically male and biologically female. They must also have been married for a minimum of three years. Had children from before Rachel and Phillip Ridgeway have thus got a large family. They already had four children. However, the twins were the first in the family to be born in this way. – We have never had in our minds that we should have a certain number of children, says Phillip. Of the five eggs that were thawed, two were not viable. A total of three eggs were inserted. – We have always meant that we will have as many (children) as God will give us, and when we heard about this, we thought that it was something we could imagine doing. Frozen eggs can be frozen largely indefinitely, according to the couple’s doctor John Gordon. – If you are frozen at almost minus 200 degrees, the biological processes are essentially reduced to almost nothing. So the difference between being frozen for a week, a month, a year, a decade, two decades, it doesn’t matter, he says. In Norway, fertilized eggs cannot be stored for that long. There used to be a five-year storage limit, but this was recently lifted.



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