In a remarkable twist to an already remarkable case, Laina Beasley is a triplet because she was conceived at the same time, by the same parents, as her two 13-year-old siblings.

Statistically, her birth should not have been possible and it marks a new medical record in the fertility treatment of couples. She was born in spite of her mother suffering a nearfatal reaction to the fertility drug Lupron. The baby’s frozen embryo also survived a fertility clinic scandal and a drive across the sweltering Californian desert while stored in a portable liquid nitrogen tank.

“I still look at her and can’t believe it,” Debbie Beasley, 45, the infant’s mother, told the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke the story of the birth yesterday. “I smell her and kiss her, and I still can’t believe she’s here.”

Ms Beasley, whose allergy to Lupron delayed her pregnancy by seven years, is a registered nurse. Her husband, and the child’s father, is Kent Beasley, 55, a former probation officer.

The birth of Laina, which means God’s gift, raises new and difficult questions over the ethics of keeping embryos on ice for decades. The embryos are the result of eggs being harvested from women donors then fertilised in a laboratory with sperm from a male partner. The process is known as in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.

In some cases, many more embryos are fertilised than are needed to produce a child. The problem of what to do with spare embryos will be made more urgent by the birth of Laina, which suggests that they can be stored for much longer than previously thought. Doctors put the chance of having a baby from a frozen embryo at about 20 per cent. About half the embryos, especially those frozen using old techniques, do not survive the thaw. Others fail to attach to the uterus.

Couples tend to put embryos on ice to avoid the difficult decision of whether to destroy them, give them to another couple or donate them to medical research. It is thought that there are close to half a million embryos being stored in liquid nitrogen throughout America.

Children born after fertility treatment using cryopreserved embryos now represent about 1 per cent of all US births. There are only 81 children in the US born from frozen embryos donated to other couples.

The Beasleys’ case highlights the risks of the largely unregulated fertility treatment industry. In the 1990s, Ms Beasley discovered that her doctor, Ricardo Asch, at UC Irvine, had taken eggs and embryos from patients without their knowledge and implanted them in other women or given them to research.

The clinic was shut down and Dr Asch was indicted, although he avoided prosecution by leaving the country. The Beasleys managed to save eight of the 12 embryos they knew about; they were told that some had been sent to the East Coast for experiments.

The Beasleys, strict Christians, planned to use all their embryos to produce children. “There has never been any question in my mind. The embryos were frozen at the two-cell stage and that was still life,” Ms Beasley told the Chronicle. “To this day, we still don’t know what happened to those (missing) embryos. It took a lot of years and a lot of counselling to accept that.”

President Bush recently invited 21 children born from “adopted” frozen embryos to the White House as part of a campaign against so-called stem-cell research. Removing stem cells from embryos kills them, leading to opposition from religious groups, in spite of the potentially lifesaving benefits of the research. “The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo,” Mr Bush said.

Religious leaders remain divided over IVF treatment itself.

Two of Ms Beasley’s embryos perished when she suffered her allergic reaction to Lupron in 1996. In June last year, after a full recovery, her new doctor, Steven Katz, thawed her remaining six embryos, which had been driven across California from a storage centre to a clinic in San Francisco.

Four of them appeared to have survived, although only one was perfectly symmetrical. All four were transferred via a catheter to her womb.

“As soon as he (Dr Katz) took the catheter out, I put my hand over my lower abdomen and said, ‘Welcome home’,” Ms Beasley said. “They had been in this cold place for so long. Now it was over. Whether God took them to heaven or they became babies, it was OK. I had waited so long to get to that point. It was finally full closure.”

Laina was born healthy but five weeks premature, weighing 6lb 4oz. Dr Katz has since been barred from practising medicine after an embryo mix-up with another patient.

THE HISTORY OF MULTIPLE BIRTHS

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