It’s a miracle treatment to many that has allowed parents all over the world to have the child they are longing for, and impressively IVF is now over 46 years old.

In fact, the first IVF baby was born in the UK in 1978, a medical marvel at the time, whose successful birth has led to 12 million more children being born from parents who couldn’t conceive naturally.

One early subscriber to IVF was Linda Archerd, who is now 62, and had a baby girl after her IVF was successful in 1994, with her daughter now 30 year old, with a 10 year old child of her own.

And incredibly, after three decades of cryopreservation, Archerd’s remaining three embryos have now resulted in another baby, born to first-time parents Lindsey and Tim Pierce.

Adopting Archerd’s embryos was a no-brainer for Lindsey and Tim, despite the fact that the embryo was frozen while they were still toddlers, as the new mom explained to MIT Technology Review:

“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records, we just wanted to have a baby. 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!”

Though the couple’s family and church are still reeling about the oddness of their newborn becoming an embryo not long after they did – not to mention the fact that, biologically, baby Thaddeus Daniel Pierce has a sister in her thirties – to the couple and Archerd, Thaddeaus’s birth is nothing short of a marvel.

Their success is thanks to Archerd choosing to keep her embryos frozen for decades – despite the thousand dollar per year cost of doing so – as a result of her Christian faith. Many Christians consider life to begin at the point of conception, rather than the point of birth; understandably, then, Archerd didn’t want what she considered to be three viable lives to be destroyed, and kept footing the bill accordingly, even after the beginning of her menopause.

With the understanding that she would never be able to carry the embryos, Archerd then discovered embryo adoption, a process by which she could request certain attributes for the family who would adopt her embryos; Archerd requested that the embryos go to a married, white couple who were Christian and lived in the US.

Enter Lindsey and Tim, who had been trying to have a baby for seven years, and took a chance on Archerd’s embryos even though many clinics – even the largely Christian clinics who facilitate embryo adoption – would warn against such, owing to the duration they had been frozen for.

And remarkably, even after all that time, one of Archerd’s embryos developed into a healthy fetus after implantation.

Born on July 26, 2025, baby Thaddeaus is absolutely a record-breaker, and Archerd is as delighted as the two parents that her decades-long endeavour has paid off:

“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. I pulled out my baby book and compared them side by side, and there is no doubt that they are siblings. I wish that they didn’t live so far away from me. He is perfect!”

While the outside world are looking on at Thaddeaus and the successful adoption process as a miracle, the new parents are understandably just happy to finally have their healthy baby boy, that they desired for so long, in their arms.

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