World’s first baby was born from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor. This took place in Brazil and its the first of its kind to have happened.
The case, published in The Lancet medical journal, involved connecting veins from the donor uterus with the recipient’s veins, as well as linking arteries, ligaments and vaginal canals.
Dani Ejzenberg, a doctor at Brazil’s Sao Paulo University hospital who led the research, said the transplant – carried out in September 2016 when the recipient was 32 – shows the technique is feasible and could offer women with uterine infertility access to a larger pool of potential donors.
The recipient had been born without a uterus due to a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. The donor was 45 and died of a stroke.
- Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome is a rare disorder that affects women.
- It is characterized by the failure of the uterus and the vagina to develop properly in women who have normal ovarian function and normal external genitalia.
- Women with this disorder develop normal secondary sexual characteristics during puberty (e.g., breast development and pubic hair), but do not have a menstrual cycle.
Five months after the transplant, Ejzenberg’s team wrote, the uterus showed no signs of rejection, ultrasound scans were normal, and the recipient was having regular menstruation.
The woman’s previously fertilized and frozen eggs were implanted after seven months and 10 days later she was confirmed pregnant.
The baby girl was then delivered via caesarean section at 35 weeks and three days, and weighed 2,550g.
With medical science advancing so much over the years, families with medical disorder won’t be out of options. Just like the woman in this article, she was given a second chance to become pregnant and carry her own baby with her own eggs.
She could have gone for surrogacy pregnancy, which is actually an arrangement to have another woman become pregnant on your behalf and endure the months of pregnancy all the way till the birth of the baby, and return the child to back to herself.
This is a clearly good example of how organ harvesting is a good thing and can help benefit the living and give them hope in life.
