Brazil Doctor Delivers Baby through Womb Transplant from a Dead Donor

Guwahati: The first ever baby taking birth from womb transplant was born now and this is an incident in Brazil where a woman received a womb transplant from another woman who is already dead. This is the first of its kind of instance wherein a womb from a dead woman’s body is being transplanted to a living woman’s body and later delivers a healthy baby successfully.

This major operation between the dead and living mothers of the baby took place connecting veins from the donor uterus with the recipient’s veins, as well as linking arteries, ligaments and vaginal canals. The operation took place in Brazil’s Sao Paulo University hospital.

Before conducting this major operation, the doctors took references from 10 previously known cases of uterus transplants of deceased donors in the United States, the Czech Republic and Turkey. Notably, the previous instances of womb transplants were failures with no fruitful result in producing a live birth.

Finally, the magic happened and the doctors in Brazil succeeded in delivering a baby girl via cesarean section at 35 weeks and three days. The newborn weighs 2,550 grams (nearly 6 lbs).

Doctor Dani Ejzenberg, one of the researches on this matter, states, “The numbers of people willing and committed to donate organs upon their own deaths are far larger than those of live donors, offering a much wider potential donor population.”

She also added that the outcomes and effects of womb donations from live and deceased donors are yet to be compared and there are even more chances of the technique to be refined and optimized.

Notably, the first human baby born through a womb transplant of a live donor had taken place in 2013 in Sweden and that was the beginning. After this, a total of 39 such procedures took place of which 11 were live births.

In the recent case of the baby born out of womb transplant from a dead person, the recipient was born without a uterus due to a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. The dead donor, on the other hand, was 45-years-old and died of a stroke.

Also read: Guwahati Still Lacks Awareness on Organ Donation