-Two women in their thirties received their mother’s uterus
-They will need to wait for one year before undergoing IVF
-If procedure works it will be the first time a mother and daughter will have grown in the same womb
-Women stop producing eggs around the age of 50 but their wombs can remain viable past 60
Doctors have carried out the world’s first womb transplants between a mother and daughter.
Within the past few days, two women have received organs donated by their mothers in the hope they will be able to have children.
The recipients, whose names have not yet been revealed, are aged between 32 and 37, and are from Sweden.
The operations each lasted seven hours and were carried out at the weekend by a team of ten surgeons from the University of Gothenburg.
One of the women had been born without a womb while the other had recently had the organ removed following surgery for cervical cancer.
Both were still able to release eggs from their ovaries and underwent IVF before the operation to produce embryos. These have been frozen and doctors intend to implant them into the women’s new wombs next year in the hope they will become pregnant.
The women were ‘tired’ following the surgery but were recovering well, the Swedish doctors said.
However, the team will not hail the operations a ‘complete success’ until the women have given birth to healthy babies. Even though the mothers are in their 50s and 60s, the doctors believe they will be healthy enough to bear children.
