New York – The phone calls and e-mails started streaming in just hours after the first news articles reported that a uterine transplant might be in the works. One caller was a 25-year- old Alabama woman who was born without a uterus. Another was a 33-year-old Illinois woman who had a hysterectomy at 24.
All of the women, desperate to carry a child, had heard that doctors at New York Downtown Hospital had harvested wombs from eight brain-dead donors, laying the groundwork for the first human uterine transplant in the Western world. They wanted to be candidates for transplants. (One caller even offered to be a living donor, saying she had already had children and no longer needed her uterus.)
The hospital has no immediate plans for a uterine transplant, but even the possibility has been greeted with dismay by many medical ethicists, fertility doctors and patient advocates. They said that a uterine transplant is a radical and potentially dangerous solution to a problem that is not life-threatening and that can be resolved in other ways, such as using a surrogate. The risks, they said, extend not only to the mother but also to the unborn child.
When and where a transplant of a uterus might take place is anyone’s guess. Bruce Logan, president of New York Downtown Hospital, said the hospital was supportive of the research but did not expect to perform a uterine transplant “any time in the foreseeable future.”
The only human uterine transplant to date was carried out in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and used an organ from a live donor, which is not being considered by the New York researchers, but the uterus failed after three months and had to be removed.
Still, Giuseppe Del Priore, the lead author of the study that described the uterus harvesting in this month’s issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, said doctors needed to be able to offer fertility patients more options.
Del Priore, a cancer specialist, said he became interested in uterine transplants after seeing young women whose surgical treatments left them unable to bear children and who were desperate to start a family.
“This is where we get our inspiration,” he said.
While the risks would be enormous, he said, some women would be willing to assume them in exchange for the possibility of having a baby.