25-year-old woman gives birth from embryo frozen 25 years ago

A father holds his baby.
(Image credit: iStockphoto)

Newborn infant Emma Wren Gibson and her mother, Tina, already have something in common: They were both conceived in the early 1990s.

In 1992, the embryo that became Emma Gibson was frozen and donated to a religious clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 2017, Tina Gibson, 25, and her husband, Benjamin Gibson, adopted the embryo, and on Nov. 25, they welcomed Emma. "I think she looks pretty perfect to have been frozen all those years ago," Benjamin Gibson said in a statement.

Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, told NBC News it's possible Emma set a record for being the oldest embryo transferred to a woman's uterus, but there's no way to determine it because of privacy laws. The length of time an embryo is frozen is "not very important," Tipton said, as the risks come when the embryo starts to thaw. If it makes it through that stage, it has the same chances of resulting in a healthy pregnancy as any other embryo.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.