Can "born" be used with creatures that come from eggs?

I have just seen this post on facebook.

It says "This two-headed turtle was born on June 18th..." so I wondered if the word "born" can be used with animals that lay eggs. Is there another word for that?

I don’t have any particular reaction against using ‘born’ for animals like turtles. It describes at what time their lifespan began, roughly.

The specific term that relates to the ‘birth’ of coming out of an egg is hatching, but that does specifically describe the moment when the eggshell cracks and the young emerges from within the egg, rather than more generically the time when you start to count the animal’s age (even though it’s the same moment, of course).

If you are talking about an old turtle, for example, it sounds more natural to me to say that it was born in 1832 than to say that it hatched in 1832.

To be born means “to be brought forth as offspring, to come into the world”. It can be used for creatures hatched from egg — or you could just use hatch.

However, you can find many references to hatched things being born. For example, from The New York Times:

This month’s army of periodical cicadas was born in 1996. Their mothers laid their eggs in the branches of trees, where they developed for a. . . .

Or from CBS News:

First bald eagle born in Pittsburgh in over 200 years

You can find many other examples of things being born that hatched from eggs.