In World First, Woman Gives Birth After Receiving Uterus Transplant from Dead Donor

- A team of doctors in Brazil have announced a medical first that could someday help countless women unable to have children because of a damaged or absent uterus. In a case report published Tuesday in the Lancet, they claim to have successfully helped a woman give birth using a transplanted uterus from a deceased donor.

According to the report, the team performed the operation on an unnamed 32-year-old woman in a Brazilian hospital in September 2016. The woman had been born with a rare genetic condition that left her without a uterus, known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, but she was otherwise healthy. The donor was a 45-year-old woman who had suddenly died of stroke; she had had three successful pregnancies delivered vaginally in the past.

Four months prior to the transplant, the recipient woman had received in-vitro fertilization, which yielded eight viable embryos that were frozen. Following the 10-hour-long surgery, which connected the uterus and part of the donor’s vagina to the recipient’s vagina and circulatory system, the woman then took a regimen of immunosuppressant drugs that kept her body from rejecting the donor uterus. Seven months later, she had an embryo successfully implanted. And 35-and-a-half weeks after that, she gave birth to a seemingly healthy baby girl, delivered via cesarean section with no complications.

Since 2013, there have been at least 10 reported live pregnancies from women with transplanted uteruses. But according to the authors, they are the first to have accomplished it with a uterus from a deceased donor (there was a documented attempt in 2011, but the pregnancy ended in miscarriage). The feat is something that could make the procedure a much more appealing and realistic way for some women to conceive.