It’s Thursday, August 7, 2025.
I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
The Birth of the ‘World’s Oldest Baby’: A Baby is Born After Being Frozen as an Embryo for 3 Decades
Well, here’s a headline. “A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old.” Another headline simply said, “World’s oldest baby born.” Now, when you see a headline like this you have to look further beneath the surface. What’s going on here? Well, Technology Review, very establishment, has actually been pretty restrained when the headline is “a record-breaking baby that has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old.” I’ll give them credit for candor in that headline. So, we’re talking about an embryo that’s more than 30 years old, an embryo that is now a baby, and a baby boy who was born just in the last couple of weeks and now holds the record for the “oldest baby.” That’s the lead.
“Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived on July 26th, was developed from an embryo that had been in storage for 30 and a half years.” Lindsay Pierce is a very happy mother, said, “ We had a rough birth, but we are both doing well now. He is so chill, we are in awe that we have this precious baby.'” Well, first of all, congratulations to this mother and father for receiving this new life. They did so through what is sometimes called a snowflake adoption, that is the adoption, which by the way, generally these days is undertaken by a Christian couple, a Christian couple adopting an embryo that had been created through IVF technology by another couple. And that couple did not transfer the embryo or all of the embryos into the mother’s womb. And thus, this is a so-called “excess embryo.” And that’s just the crude language, very morally revealing language that is sometimes used here.
And so, I have argued that it is morally licit, it is morally permissible by a Christian biblical worldview for a Christian couple to adopt one of these embryos. I do not believe it’s ethical to create the embryo in terms of the laboratory context and the commercial enterprise of IVF in the first place, that’s a very different thing. I think this shows a Christian basic worldview principle that you don’t alienate goods. So in other words, marriage, the union between the husband and the wife, the gift of life and pregnancy, the creation of the embryos, that is something that by God’s design was a composite whole. When you separate that and you alienate the goods, that’s the technical term, when you alienate the goods one from the other, you create an awful lot of moral risk. And the moral risk is demonstrated in the fact that there are well over a million so-called excess embryos created through the IVF process.
And if anything, that number’s really small. Those are the acknowledged numbers. No one has an official count. But just looking at what we are told by the IVF business itself, there are over a million of these and most of them are going to atrophy, they’re going to decay over time even as they are frozen. I mean, you understand even in the unique laboratory conditions of deep, deep freezing that has preserved these IVF-produced embryos, the fact is that’s not indefinite and no morally serious person can really claim that’s indefinite. And even in the indefinite situation you have, according to the biblical worldview, you have human beings in a frozen state. And so again, I want to say to this young couple who welcomed this baby, congratulations, and I think they’ve done a morally good thing. They did not create the embryo, they had no part in that, but it was an embryo that did exist.
Here’s what technology review tells us. “In May 1994, they managed to create four embryos. One of them was transferred to Linda’s uterus, it resulted in a healthy baby girl. The happy mom said, ‘I was so blessed to have a baby.’ The remaining three embryos were cryopreserved and kept in a storage tank.” Technology Review then tells us straightforwardly that was 31 years ago. The healthy baby girl is now a 30-year-old woman who has her own 10-year-old daughter, but the other three embryos remained frozen in time. Okay, to cut to the quick, the original couple, the mother and the father, they later divorced. So, one of the embryos was transferred into the mother’s uterus, the other three, as the article tells us, are cryopreserved in a storage tank. Now, after the divorce the decision was made to allow for the adoption of these embryos. Remember, we’re talking three decades ago. We’re talking about 30 and a half years ago.
We’re talking about the original IVF process and procedure leading to four embryos, one being transferred, and that led to the baby that the mom celebrated here, who is now herself a mom with a 10-year-old daughter, and now a sibling who is a newborn. So, this is a 30-year-old woman who has a sibling who is a newborn. Now, the sibling is not legally related to her, but is absolutely biologically related to her. The point is that as you’re thinking about this, the Christian understanding of moral risk should just jump out at us here. And so, I’ve written a lot, talked a lot about IVF, and we’re going to have to return to it from time to time simply because it is a pressing issue and the numbers are mounting, and the complexities are mounting. And this just demonstrates one of the complexities.
Now you have siblings born 30 years, actually a little bit more than 30 years apart. It’s an astounding thing. It could only happen in the modern age, it could only happen with the development of this kind of reproductive technology. Could only happen with the embryo research that has taken place, it could only happen with the business, frankly, the big business of advanced reproduction leading to IVF clinics and all the rest, it can only happen with cryopreservation and the, at least for now, preservation of so many of these embryos. But it comes with a creation of what is now hundreds of thousands of embryos who are never going to be transferred to a uterus. So, we should be thankful for this baby. Here’s another issue to the Christian biblical worldview. The birth of a baby is an unalloyed good. The circumstances of conception may not be good.
The circumstances of technology might not be good in and of themselves, different levels of moral risk, but the baby herself or himself is always to be welcomed. And that goes back even long before the technological age with the children sometimes referred to as an “illegitimate child,” though the child’s not illegitimate, the circumstances whereby the pregnancy occurred, that may be morally illegitimate. The child made in the image of God is not illegitimate and never can be.
All right. Now, when we’re doing worldview analysis let’s think of a couple of levels. Number one, the first level is that this happened. And the fact that it happened is just really important. It’s a flashing light on our dashboard. It tells us that the further complexities, the greater moral risk involved at IVF, lots of Christians want to ignore that. Lots of Christians want to dismiss that. And again, we sympathize with any couple seeking a baby and facing the heartbreak of infertility, and not receiving the baby they so desperately want.
And this is where we just have to take that category of moral risk into account and understand that different technologies, different techniques, different procedures, different avenues will lead to different levels of moral risk. But that flashing light on our dashboard tells us this is a massive moral risk. The existence of all of these embryos, massive moral risk. We’re turning human beings as babies into commodities, and in this case into frozen commodities. And as you know, it also comes with further moral alienation, the alienation from marriage, because the biggest part of the market right now, we are told when it comes to IVF and surrogacy, is not actually married heterosexual couples. It is increasingly single people, and even more that same sex couples who of course cannot reproduce by any normal means. And so the alienation, the moral alienation, is only going to grow as a deeper and deeper issue.
The Southern Baptist Convention, I’m glad to say, addressed this issue back a year ago in 2024 in a resolution. And immediately I started hearing from people who said, “Do you really have to speak to that?” And I wanted to say, “Look, there’s this flashing light on the dashboard. You can ignore it, but you can’t make it go away and it cannot be ignored for long.” And so, this is just another reminder that this issue is out there. I said the first is the fact of the moral issue itself.
The second is the fact that Technology Review has reported this. So, as is so often the case with a big issue of deep worldview significance, there are at least two dimensions when it comes to number one, the thing in itself, and secondly, how the world is talking about this thing, or the fact that it actually is talking about this thing.
So in this case, Technology Review, which isn’t given to sensationalist headlines, it is interested in this precisely because it is shocking that there could be two siblings separated by more than 30 years conceived at exactly at the same time, born more than 30 years apart. This could not have happened in previous generations, it is now something that has happened. It could well become routine. And by the way, in this case, as I say, I am thankful for the Christian couple who adopted this embryo through the snowflake adoption. They had nothing to do with the creation of the embryo, they took a positive moral act in adopting this embryo. I don’t think Christians should be complicit in the industry, but this is a very different thing.
But at the same time, you can understand how this could be used in absolutely horrifying ways. What about people who intentionally decide to do something like this? And we’re going to be looking at this issue, especially big headlines coming out of California in a related story. We’re still gathering information on that, but a lot of this is not just science fiction out there potentially sometime in the future. This is right now, this is a headline in Technology Review, not in a science fiction novel.
