Doctors in Brazil have performed the first ever successful womb transplant from a deceased donor, after the recipient gave birth to a healthy baby girl a year on from the operation.
The milestone has been documented in a report published yesterday in medical journal The Lancet.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Eight fertilised embryos conceived through IVF were frozen while she underwent surgery to receive the donor uterus, which came from a 45-year-old mother of three who died of a stroke.
Fourteen months after the operation, she gave birth to a healthy girl via Caesarean section on 15 December 2017.
Although the first successful uterus transplants took place in 2013, “no case of livebirth via deceased donor uterus has, to our knowledge, been successfully achieved” before now, say the authors of the report.
“The current norm for receiving a womb transplant is that the organ would come from a live family member willing to donate it,” says Al Jazeera, resulting in a narrow pool of potential donors who may not have the ability or willingness to donate their uterus.
The landmark procedure proves the possibility of “treating uterine infertility by transplantation from a deceased donor, opening a path to healthy pregnancy for all women with uterine factor infertility, without need of living donors or live donor surgery”, say the report’s authors.
The Times reports that around 15,000 women in the UK were born without a uterus, while others require a hysterectomy as the result of a medical condition.
Dr Dani Ejzenberg, who led the team, told The Times that he had visited the baby girl last weekend ahead of her first birthday and that she was “doing great”.
-
World’s oldest rock art discovered in IndonesiaUnder the Radar Ancient handprint on Sulawesi cave wall suggests complexity of thought, challenging long-held belief that human intelligence erupted in Europe
-
Claude Code: the viral AI coding app making a splash in techThe Explainer Engineers and noncoders alike are helping the app go viral
-
‘Human trafficking isn’t something that happens “somewhere else”’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
China’s Xi targets top general in growing purgeSpeed Read Zhang Youxia is being investigated over ‘grave violations’ of the law
-
Panama and Canada are negotiating over a crucial copper mineIn the Spotlight Panama is set to make a final decision on the mine this summer
-
Why Greenland’s natural resources are nearly impossible to mineThe Explainer The country’s natural landscape makes the task extremely difficult
-
Iran cuts internet as protests escalateSpeed Reada Government buildings across the country have been set on fire
-
US nabs ‘shadow’ tanker claimed by RussiaSpeed Read The ship was one of two vessels seized by the US military
-
How Bulgaria’s government fell amid mass protestsThe Explainer The country’s prime minister resigned as part of the fallout
-
Femicide: Italy’s newest crimeThe Explainer Landmark law to criminalise murder of a woman as an ‘act of hatred’ or ‘subjugation’ but critics say Italy is still deeply patriarchal
-
Brazil’s Bolsonaro behind bars after appeals run outSpeed Read He will serve 27 years in prison
