Uterus Transplants Hit the Clinic

Recommendable, but it is a very, very long article. I did not have the time to read it all!

It looks like a third option for women to have children besides gestational surrogacy and adoption is becoming available.

I have argued here before that in about 20-40 years from now, women may not have to give birth anymore. See e.g. my blog post here.

"... On December 8, 2016, the [Baylor University Medical Center] team made an incision in [woman]’s abdominal wall, identified the top of her vagina, and placed the donated uterus, which less than an hour earlier had been removed from an anonymous living donor, into the cavity where [woman]’s own uterus should have been. The surgeons then sewed the organ’s veins and arteries to blood vessels that extended down [woman]’s legs and watched as it began to circulate her oxygenated blood. Finally, they connected the cervix and small piece of the vagina that had come with the donor organ to the top of the [woman]’s own vagina.

With the help of immunosuppressant drugs, the [woman]’s body accepted the uterus, and six months later, her doctors placed an embryo made from her egg and her husband’s sperm into her new womb. It worked. For nearly 37 weeks she experienced an anxiety-ridden but uneventful pregnancy, and on February 19, 2018, she underwent a Cesarean section to welcome her daughter ... —the second baby born to a woman with a transplanted uterus at Baylor, and among the first dozen such babies in the world. ...
The idea of uterus transplantation to treat infertility caused by the lack of a functional uterus is less than 25 years old. Clinical trials testing the procedure in humans all started within the past decade, primarily for the condition ..: Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH), in which XX-carrying individuals are born with ovaries but no uterus. Despite its short history, uterus transplant is now becoming clinically available. This past April, Baylor surgeons performed the country’s, and possibly the world’s, first uterus transplant outside the context of a clinical trial, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is beginning to screen patients for its brand-new uterus transplant program. “It has been very fast,” ... “This is a tempo that we don’t usually see in medical innovation.” ..."

Uterus Transplants Hit the Clinic | The Scientist Magazine® With human research trials resulting in dozens of successful deliveries in the US and abroad, doctors move toward offering the surgery clinically, while working to learn all they can about uterine and transplant biology from the still-rare procedure.