- Must be weird knowing that you can technically add 30 years to your age.
Have you seen the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? If you haven’t, you should. It’s a great story of a man who is born old and ages backwards.
Recently, a newborn baby pulled off the “being born old” part in reality.
Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on July 26. At the moment of his birth, he was already technically 30 years old.
That’s because the embryo that would become Thaddeus was fertilized in 1994. It took three decades before his mother decided to allow another couple to “adopt” the embryo.
Being so old, it was by no means given that the embryo would still be viable. Yet, everything went well, and now Thaddeus’s parents are very happy with their newborn.
And they have one heck of a story to tell him once he’s old enough.
Turning to New Tech
Thaddeus’ story begins in the early 1990s with Linda Archerd and her now-ex-husband. They had been trying for a baby for six years without success.
They wanted a child, though, so they decided to turn to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“People were [unfamiliar] with it,” Archerd told MIT Technology Review, describing the attitudes she faced at the time.
“A lot of people were like, ‘What are you doing?’” she added.
Despite it all, together with her ex-husband, Archerd produced four viable embryos. One of them was implanted into her uterus and, nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
The three other embryos were stored in ice for future use. However, that opportunity never came.
Left in Storage
After her first child, Archerd wanted to have another. Her ex-husband disagreed, and the row over additional children ended with their divorce.
Archerd won custody of the three frozen embryos, and she decided to keep them in storage — despite the roughly $1,000 per year costs of doing so. She hoped that eventually, she could use them herself, hopefully with another partner.
But years went on, and the embryos remained frozen. Eventually, Archerd hit menopause and the option of having another child disappeared.
Yet, being a devout Christian, Archerd didn’t want to dispose of the embryos. She believed they deserved a chance at life, so she started exploring her options.
Embryo Adoption
Archerd found out about embryo adoption agencies. They act as middlemen to bring together an embryo donor and recipient, and both have a say who gets the embryo, when, and how.
Many of the agencies, however, wouldn’t accept Archerd’s embryos due to their age. Finally, she found the Snowflakes program, run by Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which took the embryos on their “adoption” list in 2022.
Eventually, the agency put Archerd in touch with Lindsey and Tim Pierce. They’d been trying for a baby for seven years and had decided to turn to embryo adoption.
They were a unique couple because they were willing to accept any embryo — even Archerd’s 30-year-old ones.
“We thought it was wild. We didn’t know they froze embryos that long ago,” Lindsey said.
Archerd and the Pierces got together and hit it off. They agreed that Lindsey would be allowed to carry the embryos to term.
Here Comes the Baby
Implanting the embryos into her uterus was easier said than done, however. The embryos were so old that they were stored using an unreliable slow-freeze process that has a strong chance of killing the embryos during the freezing or thawing stages.
Miraculously, all embryos survived being thawed after three decades. One, however, stopped growing in a petri dish, and one of the two embryos implanted on November 14, 2024, failed to develop.
One, however, grew into a healthy fetus. And that fetus, some months later, was born as Thaddeus.
When he was born, he smashed the record for the baby born from the oldest frozen embryo by eight years. Of course, the Pierces weren’t aiming for that when they adopted Archerd’s embryos.
“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records. We just wanted to have a baby,” Lindsey said.
With Thaddeus being born, Archerd hopes she gets to meet him one day. She also wants to introduce Thaddeus to his sister, who is three decades his senior and has a 10-year-old of her own.
“The first thing that I noticed when Lindsey sent me his pictures is how much he looks like my daughter when she was a baby,” Archerd said.
“I pulled out my baby book and compared them side by side, and there is no doubt that they are siblings.”