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Ageing Chinese mothers turn to frozen embryos, IVF to achieve dreams of family
A 46-year-old Chinese mother has given birth with an embryo that was frozen for 16 years, media reported, as more women turn to IVF to take advantage of Beijing’s relaxed family planning laws.
The woman, who is surnamed Yang, already had a son, but decided last year to enlarge her family after China scrapped its decades old ‘one-china policy’.
The first child was born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2000, and doctors at a hospital in the southern city of Guangzhou successfully “awakened” one of 18 embryos that were frozen at that time.
"I'm just really ecstatic to have another child,” said Ms Yang following the birth of her four kilogram son earlier this month, according to state-news agency Xinhua.
Xu Yanwen, a director at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, where the baby was delivered, said there has been an increase in women seeking Assisted Reproductive Technology since the one child policy was scrapped on January 1 2016.
"In 2016, we received about 1,000 woman above 40 years old seeking to have more babies, and the average age of women to have their eggs retrieved rose from 32.7 years to 33.7 years," the doctor told Xinhua.
The birth of Ms Yang’s baby follows another Chinese women - who was 45 years-old - giving birth to a child from an embryo which was frozen for 18 years last summer.
That embryo was thought to be a record for China.
Another woman, aged 33, gave birth to a boy from a 12-year-old embryo earlier last year.
Many older women who have given birth in China have often been left childless by the death of the only child that they were allowed to have under the strict family planning laws.
Additional reporting by Christine Wei