Mother births baby from ovaries frozen before puberty

When she was 9 years old, Moaza al-Matrooshi found out she would need chemotherapy to receive a bone-marrow transplant and treat a potentially fatal blood disorder.

Her family worried the chemotherapy would make her infertile, so they made a decision that was considerably rare at the time: They removed her right ovary and froze the tissue.

On Tuesday, about 15 years later, al-Matrooshi, of Dubai, gave birth to a healthy baby at London’s Portland Hospital for Women and Children.

The 24-year-old woman is believed to be the first in the world to deliver a baby after having frozen ovary tissue before puberty.

The successful birth presents “enormously valuable” news for the parents of young girls requiring risky medical treatments that can damage ovaries, Helen Picton said. Picton leads the division of reproduction and early development at the University of Leeds in England and carried out al-Matrooshi’s ovary freezing.

When Picton preserved al-Matrooshi’s ovary tissue at the University of Leeds in 2001, there was not yet proof the process would work. Then, two years ago — after more than a decade of advancements in fertility preservation — al-Matrooshi’s doctor reached out to Picton, letting her know the woman wanted to try transplanting the ovary tissue in the hopes of becoming pregnant.

Through this entire process, Picton has served as a sort of behind-thescenes architect of al-Matrooshi’s fertility restoration. Picton has never met al-Matrooshi — but she would love to someday, she said.

Last year, a woman in Belgium gave birth using ovarian tissue that was frozen at the age of 13, but unlike al-Matrooshi, she had begun puberty when her ovary was removed.

As for al-Matrooshi, she told the BBC she definitely plans to have another baby in the future.

“I always believed that I would be a mum and that I would have a baby,” she told the BBC. “I didn’t stop hoping and now I have this baby — it is a perfect feeling.”