As LifeNews previously reported, in September, a Swedish woman made medical history when she gave birth to her first child through birth by womb transplant. The woman was born without a womb because of a rare genetic condition called Mayer Rokitansky Kuster Hauser syndrome, which affects about one in 5,000 women.
She said she wanted to have a baby and a friend donated her womb after completing menopause several years earlier. Although her son was born at 32 weeks, he was healthy and discharged from the hospital 10 days after his birth. The parents named him Vincent, which means ‘to conquer.
Now, according to the Telegraph, two women have given birth using wombs donated to them by their own mothers. In November, the new mom’s delivered healthy boys via Caesarean section and were able to go home. Allan Pacey from the British Fertility Association explained to the Daily Mail why the births are really good news for the medical community.
He said, “This is a very good success rate for a new surgical procedure. If it carries on like this it may have a massive impact on things like surrogacy. Women much prefer to have their own baby and be pregnant than to watch another woman be pregnant.”
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A professor in fetal medicine at King’s College in London, Dr. Henrik Hagberg, was amazed by the grandmothers willingness to have hysterectomies to donate wombs to their daughters. He said, “It is an absolutely extraordinary gift. It is probably the best thing you can do for your daughter. The mothers were still very much doubting whether things would really go well. You don’t take anything for granted when you have experienced all of the problems they have been through.”
Amazingly, there were no complications during delivery and the first child was born to a 29-year-old born without a womb and her son weighed 5lb 8oz. The second baby weighed 5lb 15oz and was born to a 34-year-old women who had to have her womb remove because of cancer.
Dr. Dagan Wells from Oxford University also commented on the success of the womb transplants and healthy births. He said, “The numbers are still small and we probably don’t have a good handle on the true safety or how often it will be successful. But from the data available, we can say that it is looking pretty good.
That could raise the possibility of wider application – there are significant numbers of women in the population who would have perfect fertility if it was not for a problem with their womb. It is a pretty radical thing to undergo but the fact that some women have done it, even when it is in this experimental phase, really does emphasize how important it is for some women to carry their own child. I am not saying that this is the way that everyone should go but for some people, it clearly is very important.”
Currently, there are 15,000 British women who can’t have children because they were either born without a womb or had to have it removed for medical reason. This new medical advancement brings them new hope and out of the nine women who received womb transplants, three have already given birth to healthy babies.
