There's a whole lot of moral dubiousness to the practice of in-vitro fertilization, insofar as it usually results in multiple babies being created with the understanding that most of them will die. It's not good.
So give this couple credit for recognizing the ethical issues at play here and actually kind of using them for good:
The Oregon twins, who arrived October 31, have set a new world record for babies born from the oldest embryos: 29 years and 10 months.
New parents Philip and Rachel Ridgeway, who already had four kids, told The Post they felt called to have more children, and they especially wanted to help what they call "children in need." But they weren't expecting to set a record.
"We liked the idea that we are saving lives that are trapped," Philip, 35 and a software developer, told The Post.
It's true — these little lives were "trapped," frozen in place from 30 years ago:
"We knew basic information [about the genetic parents] such as height and weight, but we weren't using that [as criteria] how we were going to choose," said Rachel, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom near Portland, Oregon.
But they were more interested in, as Rachel put it, "How long have {the embryos} been waiting — which ones were waiting for parents to come and get them?"
The Ridgeways also knew that the biological father created the embryos with an egg donor and froze them on April 22, 1992, but he passed away before any of the embryos resulted in live births.
It's worth noting that, as heartwarming as this story is, not all the babies made it through:
The set the Ridgeways chose actually included five embryos, which were thawed on February 28, 2022 — nearly 30 years after they were first frozen. Three survived the process and were transferred to Rachel's uterus, resulting in a twin pregnancy.
