Thaddeus Daniel Pierce is a medical miracle, with him being born from an embryo frozen in 1994 that was thawed 3 decades later. He’s now been brought into the world as a healthy baby boy in 2025.
Linda Archerd, the woman who originally donated those embryos in 1994, had a rough time finding someone willing to bring those children into the world. She had trouble conceiving at the time with her partner and resorted to IVF (In vitro fertilization), a method of creating an embryo in a lab rather than in your body.
Four embryos were frozen, one of which was brought fully to term and born. The remaining three were frozen and lied dormant for decades.
Archerd called them her “three little hopes” in the years they spent frozen according to a report from MIT Technology Review, and, though she originally planned to have another child herself, life got in the way.
She went on a journey to see if anyone would be willing to bring her children to term, and, though it was a long process, she found a couple.
Thaddeus was just born but is also 30 years old
Archerd held out hope that her children would be born someday, with her paying around $1000 a year to keep the embryos in storage for over 2 decades.
She then found out about embryo adoption. Archerd is Christian and, as part of her beliefs, she believes that letting go of the embryos would be morally wrong.
Most agencies denied her due to the age of the embryos, but she eventually found people willing to set her up with a surrogate family.
Couple Tim and Lindsey Pierce had been trying for 7 years to have a child to no avail. Despite the intervention of multiple doctors, they weren’t able to find a solution.
Instead, Lindsey opted to give things a try with Archerd’s embryos instead. All three were thawed, with only one surviving the process. One of the embryos stopped growing and one of them didn’t make it long after being transferred into Lindsey, failing to develop into a healthy fetus.
But that one survivor is now Thaddeus David Pierce, a healthy baby boy.
According to the couple, they weren’t aiming to break any records despite now holding the title. Rather, they just wanted to anything they could to bring their own child into the world. Fortunately, they succeeded.
On the flipside, 2025 also saw the record broken for the youngest baby to survive premature birth. They were born over 4 months before term but lived to see their first birthday, with them expected to be able to live a healthy and fulfilling life.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.