Baby Born from 20-Year Old Frozen Embryo

The longest time between conception and birth of a human embryo has been thirteen years. That record has now been blown away by the recent live birth of a boy who was conceived twenty years ago:

The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF.

That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 – meaning that the boy just born to the woman in the study has a sibling out there somewhere who was conceived at the same time but is 20 years younger.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/baby-born-20-year-old-frozen-embryo | Image: RWJMS IVF Program

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If you have a child that is born from a 20-year-old frozen embryo, do you tell him? And if you do, do you just blurt it out one day (“Hey, John, it’s so cold outside. That reminds me…”)? Do you wait until just the right time (“John, before you take that job in Arizona, there’s something I have to tell you…”)? Or do you build up to it, dropping hints at various points in the child’s development? For instance, at his bar mitzvah, when they do the inevitable photo montage screening, you could slip in a shot of an ice cube. (No, I don’t know that the baby is Jewish. In fact, no one does, since the embryo was donated anonymously. He’s probably a Frozen Catholic. Or maybe a Thawed-Again Christian.) (more at laughs4dads.com)