Anne Marie Tiernon/Health Reporter
Zionsville, Oct. 20 - At 11 months Collin is a pioneer baby.
"We have had, I believe, right now 13 babies. We got one or two ongoing, two sets of twins and again we're very excited." Dr. Donald Cline's north side office walls are decorated with the pictures of nearly 5,000 babies he has help women with fertility issues conceive.
Most try fertility drugs, then invitro, implanting a woman with fertilized eggs or embryos, freezing the rest for later. "The problem is if you believe that life begins at conception, which I do, and now you've got your family completed and you've got ten frozen embryos left over, what are you going to do with them?"
Dr. Cline and colleague Dr. Tom Boldt set about the difficult process of freezing just the delicate egg. "The shell of the egg that we call the zona will break or crack, rendering the egg not alive," says Cline. "So we freeze them and then we thaw them out and they are not living."
Five years of persistence paid off. A parallel program in Italy is also successful. "Our studies and the studies in Italy have not shown any genetic abnormalities in these babies."
The success is chronicled in a recent edition of People Mmagazine, prompting New York to Los Angeles calls from cancer patients about to under chemo or single career women wanting to preserve their fertility. "If she can freeze her eggs at 35, then sometime down the line should she marry and want children she will always have 35-year-old eggs."
As for Collin, he's the result of four frozen eggs. "The first one he thawed cracked," says Collin's mother, Beth Stevens. "He thawed the three others and he fertilized. I delivered collin 37 weeks later."
Now almost a year later, Collin is happy, healthy and in many ways a medical miracle.
