PHOTOS: Healthy baby boy born from an embryo frozen 12 years ago

A healthy baby has been successfully born after spending the last 12 years in frozen suspension as an embryo. The tiny boy is believed to be the country’s longest preserved test tube baby.

The 12-year-old frozen embryo was implanted into an unnamed woman’s womb and brought to term in Tangdu Hospital, Shaanxi Province, China. The new mother has reportedly suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome and blocked fallopian tubes, health problems that can affect a woman’s chances of conceiving a baby and pregnancy, that’s why she turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2003.

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Doctors created 12 embryos with her eggs and husband’s sperm — two of them were immediately implanted, while seven others were frozen until better days. Nine months later her first son was born but she kept paying for the embryos storage until the relaxation of the country’s one child policy. Last year the couple decided they wanted to try to have another baby. Out of seven frozen embryos, three survived the thawing process, two of them were implanted and on Wednesday morning, a 40-year-old woman gave birth to her second son, weighing 3,440 grams. Share on Facebook Share 

“Our first boy is 12 years old now. The purpose of freezing the embryos was to have a second child some day, and luckily, we succeeded,” the woman’s happy husband said. Embryos can be either “fresh” from fertilized egg cells of the same menstrual cycle, or “frozen”, that is they have been generated in a preceding cycle and undergone embryo cryopreservation, and are thawed just prior to the transfer. The outcome from using cryopreserved embryos has uniformly been positive with no increase in birth defects or development abnormalities.