Just up the road in Dallas, a family is celebrating the birth of a new baby. That baby lived for nine months inside a uterus in her mommy’s abdomen, just like most babies, but that uterus originally lived in another woman.
Will more women be able to become pregnant with a transplanted uterus? Photos.com
You see, Baylor University Medical Center, has a uterus transplant program for women who were either born without a uterus or have a severely damaged one. The trial was called the “absolute uterine factor trial” and was mostly for women who have Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome.
Time magazine gives the details in this story.
What’s really cool is that this new mom got her uterus from a mother who knew that she wouldn’t be using hers any more. The donor was done having kids, but wanted to help another woman carry a child.
The doctor, Robert T. Gunby Jr., who delivered the baby by Caesarean section remarked to Time: “When I started my career we didn’t even have sonograms. Now we are putting in uteruses from someone else and getting a baby.”
Fertility science has come along way. We recently wrote about what doctors at Texas Fertility Center are doing here in Austin, including genetic testing of embryos before implanting them, figuring out when the best day for implanting embryos is, rethinking the viability of some embryos, figuring out when the uterus takes over feeding the baby from the sack around egg follicle and more.
We’ve also written about pregnancy by surrogacy, miscarriage, egg donation, and a couple who wrote about their infertility struggle.
A uterus transplant seems magical, but just like all fertility treatments, it isn’t 100 percent. Baylor University Medical Center has done eight transplants out of the 10 it plans. Three have failed, it told Time, and one more has resulted in a pregnancy.
The procedure wasn’t inexpensive either. Time reports that it costs about $500,000 and the hospital got donations for the study participants.
Would this be something you would do? Would you donate your uterus?
