First ever baby born from transplanted womb

A 36-year-old Swede has become the first woman to give birth after receiving a womb transplant, medical journal the Lancet reports. The baby boy was born by Caesarean section at the University of Gothenburg’s hospital last month, weighing 1.775kgs. Doctors say that the baby is healthy.

“It was breathtaking. I think all of us felt that,” Liza Johannesson, the surgeon said. “It was like having your own child, actually it was the same feeling. No one could really believe it.”

The mother has a genetic condition called Rokitansky syndrome, meaning that she was born without a womb. However, her ovaries remained intact. A 61-year-old family friend who had already gone through menopause donated her womb to her, and the organ was transplanted in a 10-hour surgery last year. The organ recipient underwent in-vitro fertilisation, where eggs from her ovaries were harvested and fertilised with her partner’s sperm in a petri dish. A year after the womb transplant, surgeons implanted a single embryo directly into her transplanted womb. She took a pregnancy week three weeks later and tested positive.

The surgeons involved in this operation said that this operation means that the last major barrier of female infertility, the absence of a uterus, has been broken down.

“Absolute uterine factor infertility is the only major type of female infertility that is still viewed as untreatable,” they wrote in the medical journal.