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In a medical first, a woman in Sweden has given birth after a womb transplant, says the doctor who pioneered the procedure.
The 36-year-old mother received a uterus from a close family friend last year.
Her baby boy was born prematurely but healthy last month, and mother and child have now gone home and are doing well.
“The baby is fantastic,” said Dr Mats Brannstrom, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Gothenburg and Stockholm IVF who led the research and delivered the baby with the help of his wife, a midwife.
“But it is even better to see the joy in the parents and how happy he made them.”
Brannstrom said it was “still sinking in that we have actually done it”.
The procedure opens up a new but still experimental alternative for some of the thousands of women each year unable to have children because they lost a uterus to cancer or were born without one.
Previously, experts had questioned whether a transplanted womb could nourish a fetus.
For the proud parents — both competitive athletes who have not been identified — the years of research and experimentation were well worth the wait.
“It was a pretty tough journey over the years, but we now have the most amazing baby,” the father said.
“He is very, very cute, and he doesn’t even scream, he just murmurs.”
The couple were convinced the procedure would work, despite its experimental nature.
Brannstrom and colleagues transplanted wombs into nine women over the past two years as part of a study, but complications forced removal of two of the organs.
This year, Brannstrom began transferring embryos into the seven other women. He said two other pregnancies were at least 25 weeks along.
There had been two previous attempts to transplant a womb in Saudi Arabia and Turkey but no live births resulted.
Doctors in Britain, France, Japan, Turkey and elsewhere are planning to try similar operations, but using wombs from women who have just died in- stead of from live donors. The Swedish mother had healthy ovaries but was born without a uterus — a syndrome seen in one girl in 4500.
She received a uterus from a 61-year-old family friend who had gone through menopause after giving birth to two children.
Brannstrom said he was surprised such an old uterus was so successful but that the most important factor seemed to be that the womb was healthy.
The recipient has had to take three medicines to prevent her body from rejecting it.