Boy born from embryo frozen 16 years ago

A healthy baby boy has been born from an embryo frozen 16 years ago, a hospital in South China announced on Feb 6.

A 46-year-old woman gave birth to her second son at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong province early this month. "I'm ecstatic to have another child," she said.

Her first son, already 16 years old, was from the same batch of embryos frozen in 2000. She gave birth to him through in vitro fertilization after the hospital froze her 18 other embryos.

Last year, the mother came to the hospital expressing a desire to get pregnant again, following the implementation of the second-child policy.

"There were a few issues to address when she asked to thaw her embryos," says Xu Yanwen, director of the hospital's reproductive center.

"It was not easy to thaw the frozen embryos and there were also some problems with her womb," Xu says, adding that the risk of complications increases with a woman's age.

Both the baby and mother are said to be in stable condition and due to be discharged from hospital soon.

Xu says that more women are having their embryos thawed, and that some frozen embryos at the hospital date back as far as 1994.

As China relaxed the family planning policy, an increasing number of women of an advanced maternal age have visited the hospital expressing a desire to conceive with the help of Assisted Reproductive Technology, Xu says.

"Last year, we received about 1,000 women above the age of 40 seeking to have babies, with the average age of women thawing their embryos rising from 32.7 to 33.7," Xu adds.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 02/10/2017 page15)