Uterine Transplants
Hope for Women as Doctors Will Attempt World's First Womb Transplant
Medics will be attempting to transplant a whole uterus, for the first time in history.
Doctors in the USA are planning to be the first medical professionals ever to attempt to transplant a whole uterus into the body of an infertile woman. Screening has already begun to establish which women will be suitable candidates for the surgery.
The organs would come from donors who are deceased. The recipient would have to take a battery of anti-rejection drugs, the same as any other transplant patient, to ensure her body did not reject the new uterus. Doctors would wait 3 or 4 months after the operation to make sure that it has worked and the organ is functioning, before they would commence with fertility treatment using the recipient's previously fertilized, frozen embryos.
If a pregnancy is achieved and if it goes to term, the fetus would be delivered by caesarean section at which time the transplanted uterus would also be removed, to miminise risk to the mother.
All of this is highly speculative, however, as they don't actually know whether any of it is possible. It was attempted in Saudi Arabia in 2000, on a 26 year old woman who became infertile after the birth of her first child. She had had a post-partum haemorhage and doctors had to do an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. She received the donor uterus from a 46 year old woman, but unfortunately the experiment failed after eventual organ rejection and did not produce a pregnancy. The uterus had to be removed.
The procedure has been successful in mice and even resulted in mice pups, but mice are a long way off from humans. The transplanted wombs also did not reject in rabbits and pigs, but these species did not produce babies.
Researchers are unwilling to admit defeat and will be trying again, this time in America, against some opposition.
The proposed operation offers a glimmer of hope to women who have had hysterectomies or who have no fallopian tubes, or whose own womb would be unable to carry a baby to term, for instance, through being an abnormal shape. But those who oppose the idea say that it's too radical and that, unlike a heart transplant, uterine transplants would not be done to save lives. Infertility is not life threatening, whereas a failed heart is.
For women without the chance of carrying their own biological child, this represents their only opportunity to be pregnant, and for some, this might be worth the risks of undergoing such drastic surgery.
