Baby Is First in U.S. to Be Born After Uterus Transplant

Doctors at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas recently delivered the baby of a woman who received a uterus transplant after being born without a uterus herself. It's the first successful time in the U.S. a baby has been born to someone with a transplanted uterus.

According to Time, the woman's transplant was part of a larger uterus transplant clinical trial. To protect the privacy of the women and baby, few details were provided about the woman who received the uterus transplant or the details of the birth, although Time reports the baby was born healthy.

You May Also Like

WellnessAbdominal Pain and Cramping After Sex: Here's What You Need to Know

Wellness5 Women Pose for Striking Pubic Hair Portraits

For the uterus transplant clinical trial, the Baylor University team looked for women with absolute uterine factor infertility, meaning either their uteruses didn't work or they were born without one. While the women who gave birth was born without a uterus, she does have working ovaries and had undergone in vitro fertilization to get pregnant after her uterus transplant.

Taylor Siler, the 36-year-old mother of two who donated her uterus to the unnamed mother, underwent comprehensive physical and mental testing before she was approved for the trial. The hospital told Time that the transplant took a total of 10 hours, including five hours to remove the uterus from Siler and another five hours to transplant it. Once a recipient recovers from the transplant operation, doctors will attempt to implant a fertilized embryos in the uterus. The medical center noted that its team is looking to do a total of 10 uterus transplants; of eight so far, at least three have been unsuccessful, while another transplant recipient is currently pregnant.

Doctors were thrilled with how the surgery — and subsequent birth — went. "It was very special to look in the eyes of the mother, she was told when she was a teenager that she would never see this moment and then all of a sudden you see this happening and you think everything has meaning," Giuliano Testa, the surgical chief of abdominal transplantation at the Baylor University Medical Center told ABC News.

This surgery wasn't the first-ever successful uterus transplant to take place. Doctors in Sweden delivered a uterus transplant patient's baby during a medical trial in 2014, and a total of eight children in the country have been born via transplanted uteruses so far.

---

More on pregnancy and labor:

---

Watch this: