Kristen Gyles | One-year-old mother?

Emma Wren Gibson is now seven years old but could have been 32. Her embryo was formed in October 1992, and sat frozen and unused in a lab for almost 24 years until Tina and her husband Ben decided that due to issues they were having conceiving a baby naturally, they wanted to adopt an embryo. They adopted little embryonic Emma and the rest is history.

Emma’s embryo was implanted in Tina’s womb and she gave birth to a bouncing baby girl in November of 2017. What is interesting is that Tina was born in 1991, which means she was only one year old when Emma was conceived. If Emma was born in the usual nine months after conception, she could have been BFFs with her own mom.

It doesn’t end there. At the time, it was speculated that Emma was the oldest frozen embryo to ever come to maturity as a baby. However, three years later, Tina and Ben appeared to have broken their own record when they had Emma’s sister, Molly, who was also from the same batch of frozen embryos. So, by this time, Molly’s embryo was 27 years old. So, although Molly will grow up to be 3 years younger than Emma, the sisters are technically twins since they were fertilized at the same time.

Isn’t that weird?

It might sound that way, but this is now nothing strange. The first person born from an in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedure was born in 1978, and since then several million IVF babies have been born.

A woman who said she was 26 years old, posted a TikTok video detailing her own experience as an IVF baby. Just like Molly and Emma, this woman and her little sister were both fertilised at the exact same time in the exact same batch. However, she just happened to have been implanted first, and her sister implanted and birthed three years later.

PLOT THICKENS

The plot thickens. She says now her parents don’t know what to do with her roughly 30 other ‘siblings’ who were formed in the same batch but ended up being unused. Her parents do not want 30 children. At the same time, IVF is becoming increasingly accessible and they fear that no one will necessarily want 30-year-old frozen embryos when they can get fresh ones. So, for now, this lady’s genetic siblings are sitting frozen in a lab, awaiting their fate.

This is one of the concerns that critics of IVF have. Some are of the view that it is unethical to create embryos only to turn around and destroy them. So many are the people who hold this opinion that the Supreme Court in one state in the US, issued a ruling recognising frozen embryos as children, thereby endowing them with the right to not be destroyed.

Although an embryo at this formative and almost microscopic stage, is not known to have any feelings, emotions, hopes or dreams, I must admit, for some reason I do feel some hesitation and perhaps even, sadness, about flushing them all down the drain and killing them. But this is frankly just a part of the IVF package. During an IVF cycle, several eggs are extracted from the ovaries of the biological mother because some of the eggs will not become fertilized and others that do become fertilised will be considered defective for various reasons. In other words, a trying couple typically wants to know they have several ‘backups’.

ANOTHER QUESTION

And that gives rise to another question. If you could see all the way down the line to the end of your nine-month pregnancy, that the baby you are about to conceive, will be born with no limbs, no sight, no hearing, no other physical senses and a severely malfunctioning heart, would it be ethical to still have that baby? Proponents of IVF will say it is a convenient method of directing the birth process to ensure that the baby who is born is healthy and free from defects. Opponents say, it is all just eugenics.

Babies born through IVF look, walk and talk just like naturally conceived ones. However, they typically have highly desired physical qualities. This is because, especially where a couple wants to adopt an embryo, they go through a stringent selection process to choose an embryo with the genes they want their child to have. And, well, is that so wrong?

Regardless of what your precise opinions are about IVF, what this all highlights is the blessing of being able to conceive naturally. Unfortunately, many take this natural endowment lightly. It can be painful wanting a child and not being able to conceive one and the IVF process has created families where all that existed was the pain of infertility. From this standpoint, IVF might be something to embrace. However, it is useful to acknowledge that the entire IVF process is somewhat of a steep and slippery slope.

In the TikTok video posted by the 26-year-old ‘IVF baby’, she mentioned that she has always wondered what it would be like to give birth to one of her genetic siblings and has toyed with the idea. She said she would be curious to see what one of her little brothers would have been like. Except, if she decides to go this route, she would quite literally be the biological mother of her own genetic sibling. Her mother would be both mother and grandmother to the baby and her father would be both father and grandfather to the baby. What an entanglement.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com