A surprising science and medical miracle has occurred with the birth of a newborn baby that is actually 30 years old. The baby, named Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, was born from an embryo frozen as far back as 1994. Now, more than three decades later, he has been thawed and successfully birthed in 2025.
As shared via Dexerto, the baby was first donated with a batch of embryos by Linda Archerd in 1994. The outlet describes her as having “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.”
Archerd donated a total of four embryos that were frozen. One of them was brought to term and born. It was the other three that spent decades frozen before the latest one, young Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, was finally born himself on July 26, 2025, as pointed out via the below social media post.
The world’s oldest baby has been born from an embryo frozen in 1994
Thaddeus Daniel Pierce is over 30 years old despite being born July 26, 2025 pic.twitter.com/0hvbGN9ov0
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) August 3, 2025
While she wanted to have another child, she had to instead find another couple as life got in the way, and she finally did after spending $1,000 a year to keep her embryos in cold storage. It wasn’t until she discovered embryo adoption that she finally found a way to connect with a potential surrogate family – one that finally worked out after she was turned down by most agencies due to the age of the embryos.
The couple that was ultimately chosen for the opportunity were Tim and Lindsey Pierce, who struggled for seven years to try and have a child. They ultimately decided to try Archerd’s embryos. Out of the remaining three, only one survived the process after being thawed, and that embryo became the healthy baby boy now named Thaddeus.
It’s an impressive feat that combines the science of 1994 with the technology we now have available in 2025, allowing a 30-year-old embryo to find life as a newborn baby. Meanwhile, the Pierce couple have admitted they didn’t want to break any records with their pregnancy, they simply wanted to be able to finally have a child – and they did.
