World’s oldest baby born from 30-year-old frozen embryo

A US baby boy born to an Ohio couple holds a new record for the world’s “oldest baby”.

The boy named Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on July 26, 2025, from the embryo that was frozen 30 years ago. The parents, Lindsey and her husband, Tom Pierce, “adopted” the embryo from a woman who had created it in 1994.

While talking to MIT Technology Review, Lindsey told, “We had a rough birth but we are both doing well now. He is so chill. We are in awe that we have this precious baby. It’s like something from a sci-fi movie.”

“The baby has a 30-year-old sister who is mother to a 10-year-old,” she added. Interestingly, Tim the baby’s father was a toddler when the embryos were first created.

A sci-fi tale

In the early 1990s, Linda Arched and her then husband decided to try IVF treatment after years of futile attempts to conceive. Luckily, the technique resulted in four embryos in May 1994. The one embryo was placed into Arched’s uterus, resulting in a healthy baby girl.

However, the remaining three embryos were crypto preserved and kept in a storage tank.

Initially Linda planned to use the embryos for herself. As the menopause hit her, instead of discarding these embryos she came across the idea of embryo adoption.

In this type of adoption, both donor and recipient have a say in whom they place their embryos with or adopt them from and it is overseen by the agencies due to religious reasons.

Making a match

Ms Archerd paid thousands of dollars a year for storage until she found a Christian embryo adoption agency, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which took the initiative under the banner of Snowflakes.

However, Arched set the rigid criteria as her preference was for a married Caucasian, Christian couple living in the USA,

“I didn’t want them to go out of the country and being Christian is very important to me, because I am,” she said.

Eventually she got the perfect match for her embryo.

Lindsey and Tom Pierce had tried to conceive for seven years. After years of struggling, they decided to adopt Arched's embryo.

“We did not go into it thinking we would break any records. We just wanted to have a baby,” Lindsey said.

This embryo is believed to break the world-record as one of the longest frozen before resulting in a successful birth. The previous record was held by twins born in 2022 from embryos frozen in 1992.