A woman with a transplanted uterus just gave birth — a first for the U.S.
It’s a promising sign for women unable to conceive
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
In 2014, Swedish doctors made history by delivering a healthy 3.9-pound baby as a result of a successful uterus transplant.
Before, women with uterine factor infertility were told that no uterus meant no pregnancy.
But now the equation has changed, and doctors at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas say a woman born without a uterus has delivered a baby after a successful transplant. It’s the first time the surgery has worked outside of the Swedish hospital that pioneered the procedure.
(The university hasn’t released the names of the mother or the baby, saying they chose to remain anonymous. But according to Tech Times, the donor uterus came from Taylor Siler, a Dallas nurse who has two children. She said she wanted to offer another woman a chance to give birth.)
While this most recent birth is a step forward, uterine transplantation surgery is still in its very early days, and doctors conceded that there had been setbacks, particularly with the earliest volunteers.
The first uterus transplant
In February 2016, Lindsey McFarland became the first woman to receive a uterus transplant in the United States. The organ came from a dead donor and was implanted during a nine-hour surgery.
Her story gave a sense of just how tenuous the nascent surgery is. She had to have her transplanted uterus removed after coming down with a yeast infection.
Baylor’s clinical trial
The fact that the uterus transplant success in Sweden can be replicated is a promising sign for thousands of women who have been unable to conceive. And doctors at Baylor have sought to expand the limits of the procedure, using donated uteri that didn’t come from family members and, in some cases, organs that came from cadavers.
- It was designed to include 10 women. According to Newsweek, most of the women in Baylor’s trial had Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH)syndrome, which makes pregnancy and giving birth impossible.
- Eight, including the new mother, have received the transplants so far.
- One recipient is pregnant, and two are trying to conceive.
- Four others had transplants that failed, and the organs had to be surgically removed.
Other transplants to improve people’s lives
The success marked another step forward for transplant surgery aimed at improving a person’s life, not just saving it.
- Doctors have performed penis transplants for wounded troops.
- They gave a young boy two new hands.
- They also gave a new nose, lips, palate, eyelids and jaw to a woman who was gruesomely disfigured after she was shot in the face.
A unique transplant situation
The uterus surgeries differ from other transplants in one major way: They’re not intended to be permanent. Instead, they give a woman enough time to conceive a child. In vitro fertilized eggs are transferred to the woman’s womb, and after the baby is born, the uterus is removed via surgery.
That means the patient doesn’t have to spend a lifetime taking powerful drugs that suppress her immune system, which would put her at risk for dangerous long-term complications.
“We do transplants all day long,” Giuliano Tesla, who heads the uterus transplant clinical trial at Baylor University Medical Center, told Time magazine. “This is not the same thing. I totally underestimated what this type of transplant does for these women. What I’ve learned emotionally, I do not have the words to describe.”
