First womb-transplant baby born in Sweden
A Swedish woman has given birth to a baby boy using a transplanted womb in a medical first, surgeon says.
A 36-year-old Swede has become the world’s first woman to give birth after receiving a womb transplant, doctors said.
“It was breathtaking. I think all of us felt that,” Liza Johannesson, the surgeon, said in a video supplied by her university on Saturday. “It was like having your own child, actually, it was the same feeling. No one could really believe it.”
The healthy baby boy was born last month at the University of Gothenburg’s hospital. Both mother and infant are doing well.
Weighing 1.775kgs, the baby was born by Caesarean section at 31 weeks after the mother developed pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy condition, according to the medical journal The Lancet.
Because of a genetic condition called Rokitansky syndrome, the new mother was born without a womb, although her ovaries were intact.
Womb transplant procedure
The surgeons said the feat smashes through the last major barrier of female infertility, which is the absence of a uterus as a result of heredity or surgical removal for medical reasons.
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“Absolute uterine factor infertility is the only major type of female infertility that is still viewed as untreatable,” they said in a paper published by the British journal.
The replacement organ came from a 61-year-old woman, a close family friend who had been through menopause seven years earlier. The organ was transplanted in a 10-hour operation last year.
The recipient underwent in-vitro fertilisation, in which eggs were harvested from her ovaries and fertilised using sperm from her partner, and then cryogenically preserved.
A year after the transplant, a single early-stage embryo was inserted into the transplanted womb. A pregnancy test three weeks later was positive.