Lindsey and Tim Pierce first held their newborn son in July — more than three decades after he was conceived.
Born from a frozen embryo the Ohio couple adopted, Thaddeus Daniel Pierce is being called “the world’s oldest baby” because he is the oldest known frozen embryo to be brought to term. As explained in MIT Technology Review, Thaddeus was conceived through in vitro fertilization in 1994; he has a biological sister who is 30 years old.
The circumstances of his birth challenge what we think we know about IVF — what the limits are, in medicine and in morality.
Since Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby,” was born in 1978, the technology has enabled millions of people to become parents — but also created a vexing moral dilemma: what is to become of all the embryos created through IVF that are not used?
For people who believe that human life should be treasured and protected from the moment of conception, discarding these embryos amounts to taking a life which is one reason that many people of faith oppose IVF.
And yet the number of embryos in cryostorage — thought to be more than a million in the U.S. alone — exceed the number of couples seeking to adopt them. And even when a couple decides to adopt an embryo, not every doctor is willing to work with one that is decades old.
That’s why the founder of a fertility clinic in Tennessee has stepped into this complicated space.
Dr. John Gordon, a reproductive endocrinologist who formerly practiced in northern Virginia, came to the work after some soul-searching, the kind that many others are doing as the choices offered by reproductive medicine are expanding, to including testing for both physical traits and diseases.
The questions before us include not just the moral worth of an embryo, but what we believe about the meaning of life and the very purpose of children.
How long can a human embryo be frozen?
Thaddeus Pierce, “the world’s oldest baby,” began life through an IVF procedure that created four embryos in 1994. One, a girl, was brought to term and raised by parents who later divorced.
The mother, Linda Archerd, was awarded custody of the three remaining embryos, and at first thought that she might get pregnant again some day. She paid hundreds of dollars every year for their storage until she eventually donated them to Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which has a program for embryo adoption called “Snowflakes.”
Archerd’s embryos were considered “hard to place,” because of their age. But they weren’t too old for Gordon, who left a thriving practice near Washington, D.C. after a hard conversation with his wife.
In 2018, the couple was preparing for a vacation in Italy when Gordon’s wife — who has a Ph.D. in engineering — broke her ankle. While she was recovering, she spent time studying scripture (they are members of the Presbyterian Church in America), and became convinced that the way Gordon was practicing “wasn’t honoring God and wasn’t the right thing to do.”
She was troubled by the number of embryos that were being created and not used, and also by the losses of embryos when storage procedures failed in Ohio and California.
Gordon recounted the conversation they had.
“She said, are you trying to deal with this problem? ... If you’re not worrying about this problem and trying to fix it, then nobody’s going to be dealing with it. You need to fix this and or at least think about what you’re doing.”
That was fair criticism, he acknowledged.
“This is a field in which we’ve walked into some moral peril, and I took the charge seriously and I dove deep and reached out to a lot of different individuals.”
One person he talked with was a Jesuit priest who told him to think about it like this: You’re sitting by a river and see a basket floating down the river with a baby in it. You bring it to shore, and then you see two more baskets with babies floating by. You bring them to shore, and then you look up the river, and all you see, from riverbank to riverbank, are baskets with babies floating toward you.
“This is what you have created in the field of reproductive medicine. This is the problem you have created with all these frozen embryos,” the priest told him.
He started thinking about how he could practice in a way that reflected his values, still helping couples overcome infertility while creating fewer “excess” embryos.
“If you’ve got 27 embryos, how do you prioritize? I would say it’s better to not make 27 embryos in the first place.”
At a friend’s recommendation, Gordon decided to relocate to Knoxville and to open a practice with the goal of every viable embryo getting a chance at life. The clinic has a “no discard” policy, and Gordon says, “The only embryo that can never result in a healthy baby is the one you fail to transfer.”
Rejoice also doesn’t do genetic testing on embryos, or do IVF with donor egg and sperm.
However, Gordon said, “I wouldn’t fault anyone for practicing differently, whether they’re believers or nonbelievers. However they practice, that’s up to them. But for myself, this is how I want to practice. And that’s what I tell the patients. And they seem open to that, and many have sought me out because of it.”
Some people have told Gordon they had previously been reluctant to pursue IVF because of their discomfort with creating embryos that would be frozen indefinitely.
And so far, there appears to be no limit to how long these children-to-be can be frozen, despite concern about the practice worldwide.
Which is why we now live in a world in which a 30-year-old father and the infant son whose embryo he adopted could have been conceived in the same calendar year.
Does the U.S. regulate IVF?
While some countries have limited the number of embryos that can be created in an IVF cycle and others limit the number of years that embryos can be stored, according to a 2024 review by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the U.S. has relatively few restrictions regarding IVF, and they vary by state.
Louisiana, for example, has a law prohibiting the destruction of embryos but they can be shipped out of state. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine and other professional groups have guidelines for practitioners “but there’s no real enforcement mechanism and they truly are recommendations,” said Matthew Eppinette, executive director of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois.
“It’s not uncommon in ethics circles to hear the phrase ‘wild, wild West’ being used about the state of reproductive technologies in the United States,” Eppinette said.
The ethics of assisted reproductive technology is such a broad subject that it will comprise two of five sessions in an online course Eppinette is leading next month on “The Ethics of Life and Death.”
In the U.S., assisted reproduction was caught up into politics after a 2024 ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that said “an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization.” The decision allowed parents to sue a fertility clinic for wrongful death after frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed.
Seeking to assuage concern that IVF would be unavailable when embryos are granted personhood, President Donald Trump issued an executive order this year affirming IVF for couples who are unable to conceive, and pledging to provide “support, awareness, and access to affordable fertility treatments ... (to) help these families navigate their path to parenthood with hope and confidence.”
Eppinette said he would like to see better tracking of the numbers of embryos being kept indefinitely in storage. There is no mandatory reporting, which is why estimates range between 1 and 10 million. “That’s a good first step” in grappling with the issue.
But he he also said there hasn’t been enough deep and thoughtful discussion about the moral issues involved, beginning with the fundamental question: What do we think about children?
“Are they projects of our design or gifts to be received? Those are extreme examples, but what do we think about when we think about welcoming new life into the world, and what do we mean by welcoming?” he said.
With regard to embryos, “Are they tissue to be screened or human lives to be respected, cherished and cared for? And those views lead to significantly different ways of acting and thinking about these very early forms of human life.”
The moral status of embryos
Meanwhile, the ethical questions posed by assisted reproduction technology continue to expand, as new companies such as Orchid screens embryos for health risks and some fertility clinics offer testing to screen for physical traits like eye color.
Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui, in conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, explained how an Orchid “genetic counselor” meets with couples and goes through the risks of each embryo, which is evaluated for the likelihood of developing more than 1,200 conditions, which include Down syndrome, autism, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Celiac disease. The cost is $2,500 per embryo.
In the conversation, Douthat pressed Siddiqui to answer whether an embryo has any moral status, a question which she did not clearly address.
Various religious traditions have also grappled with the question, not only as it relates to IVF, but also to research and abortion.
In 2024, Southern Baptists meeting in Indianapolis adopted a resolution affirming “the right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.”
The Catholic Church teaches that IVF generally is “morally unacceptable.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "discourages artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization using sperm from anyone but the husband or an egg from anyone but the wife. However, this is a personal matter that is ultimately left to the judgment and prayerful consideration of a lawfully married man and woman,” according to the church’s handbook on church policies and guidelines.
Gordon said the dilemma that Linda Archerd faced decades ago — what to do about her frozen embryos — is one that the entire country is now facing writ large.
“No one, when they’re going through infertility, ever thinks that they can have too many embryos, because they’re worried (IVF) won’t work, and they want to have a backup plan. They can’t even imagine the flip side of that.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said the Gordons are members of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. They are members of the Presbyterian Church in America.