About one in every 4,500 baby girls are born without a uterus. If they want to have children of their own someday, surrogacy or adoption have historically been the only available options. But one medical center plans to change that within the next few months.
A team of doctors at the Cleveland Clinic are in the midst of practice surgeries, gearing up for the first uterine transplant in the US. These transplants, unlike those of vital organs, will be temporary; each uterus will be removed after the recipient has a child or two, allowing her to stop taking strong transplant anti-rejection drugs.
Any pregnancies that occur with the help of these uteruses will be considered high-risk. And not much is known about the effect of anti-rejection drugs on fetuses, except they’ve been known to give the moms-to-be a greater risk of developing preeclampsia. But women are lining up for the opportunity to experience pregnancy and childbirth.
“I crave that experience,” an anonymous candidate and mom of two adopted children tells _ The New York Times_. “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”
While this is a relatively new endeavor in the US medical field, there has been some success with the procedure in Sweden, where nine women have received uterine transplants from live donors. The first healthy baby was successfully delivered in September 2014, followed by three others, with one more due in January.
To lower the risk, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic plan to use deceased donors instead. They’ll practice the procedure 10 times before performing an actual transplant, and donor recipients will then have to undergo in vitro fertilization in order to conceive.
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