It’s a news story, but its exposure has been limited. It’s been more prominent in social media than traditional media.
It’s the birth of Baby Thaddeus Daniel Pierce on July 26.
Who’s Baby Thaddeus? Well, some headlines called him “the world’s oldest baby.”
He was conceived in 1994. He was allowed to be born two weeks ago. Most pregnancies last 40 weeks. This one, if you accept a loose definition of “pregnancy,” lasted over 1,600.
Baby Thaddeus was one of four embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1994. As is typical in IVF cases, multiple embryos are created, but usually only one or two are chosen to be implanted in a woman’s body. If there are multiple implants that “take,” and the woman does not want twins, “embryonic reduction” (AKA abortion) is induced. If multiple implants are not attempted, the “leftovers” are treated like the meatloaf not used up at supper: they’re either discarded or put in the refrigerator.
Baby Thaddeus was put in a deep freeze — cryopreservation.
The woman who originally decided to manufacture a baby through IVF kept Baby Thaddeus and the other embryos on ice because she had vague plans of future pregnancies — hopes that came to naught. First, she got divorced. Then, after 30 years, menopause set in. So, as is the case of many people as they move toward their golden years, she decided it was time to downsize. That meant cleaning out the stuff in storage, including the three frozen embryos.
Not wanting to destroy them, she offered them to an “adoption” agency that takes frozen embryos and finds new women who want to incubate and birth them. They label these orphans “snowflakes.” That’s how Baby Thaddeus was born.
At first glance, some might say it’s a happy ending and a “miracle” for a new couple. But let’s get past the prettifying language about “snowflakes” and “miracles” to ask what’s at stake for the larger society.
What does this say about age? Baby Thaddeus was conceived in 1994. His adoptive father — the man who will now raise him — was then a toddler. Does that make sense?
Do we know anything about the ramifications of such extended cold storage? Pro-abortionists would object to me calling him “Baby Thaddeus.” Well, given that our cells themselves measure age, do we know if “Clump of Cells” Thaddeus is a clump that’s 30 — or newborn?
What does this procedure say about relationships? Baby Thaddeus was passed over in 1994 for implantation and birth in favor of his sister. His sister is now 30 (with a ten-year old child of her own). That means she is in her reproductive years. Baby Thaddeus’s sister could then also have been his surrogate mother. That would make him “brother” and “son” at the same time. It would also simultaneously make him uncle and some-kind-of-brother (?) to her ten-year-old. Given IVF’s inherent disconnect of conception and gestation from upbringing, what does that mean for concepts of “relationship”? Incest? Does society think this is a healthy arrangement?
Perhaps the biggest question is the one that Roe v. Wade managed to evade for 49 years. In that decision legalizing abortion on demand, Justice Harry Blackmun took pains to assert that “we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” (410 US 113, at 159). The truth is that Blackmun did resolve it. He just wouldn’t admit to the deed.
That question comes back with a vengeance in the Baby Thaddeus case. What was he from 1994 to 2025? During those 31 years, was he alive? If so, did he have any right to birth? If he was not alive, what was he? It would be amazing to say that something not alive for 31 years managed to become a baby. That might even disprove Louis Pasteur’s refutation of the theory of spontaneous generation!
Our answer as Americans cannot be “who knows (or cares)”? For one, it is a cavalier denial that real existential issues affecting how we understand millennially sanctioned and uncontested human relationships are at stake. For another, it calls into question the basic question: Why do we have a government?
Yes, the philosophers were on to something when they posed the question how a supposedly free people come to find that freedom limited by the rule of some government. The justification articulated by many of the thinkers on whom the American Founding Fathers relied was that free people either form associations or are compelled to band together under a government in order to protect their rights. Without an impartial government protecting citizens’ rights fairly and equally, one runs the risk of having one or two very powerful people...and a lot of dead bodies they’ve stepped over. That’s why Jefferson spoke of safeguarding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (in that order) as the function of government. A government that does not take care of those basic things has no claim to abridge individuals’ freedom.
This brings us back to the question of Baby Thaddeus. Was he or wasn’t he alive these past 31 years? If he was, was it an injustice to condemn him to an indefinite “half-existence” — alive but not fully living and developing? The news doesn’t tell about the two other embryos put into cold storage along with Baby Thaddeus in 1994. Are they continuing in some kind of suspended animation — left indefinitely to...what? Obsolescence? Destruction? Hope?
I do not begrudge Baby Thaddeus his life. I wish him well, though we should admit we have no idea what effect 31 years of a deep freeze will have on him or his abilities one day to be a father. Nor do I minimize the pain of sincere people who want parenthood but cannot become parents. But IVF is not a solution. It is a Band-Aid that makes a baby for them...but at what social costs? It’s time we as a society discussed them.
Image via Freepik.