"It was a beautiful thing to watch," Dr. Giuliano Testa, the surgical chief of abdominal transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, said during the successful delivery of the first American baby born from a transplanted uterus.
The baby was delivered last month to a mother who had been born without a uterus, and received a transplant at Baylor University Medical Center, last September as part of an ongoing study.
The woman suffered from a type of infertility referred to as Absolute Uterine Factor Infertility, affecting approximately 1 in 500 women, where the uterus is non-functioning or nonexistent.
"All of us had tears in our eyes. This little boy will stay with us for our entire life, he's one of us." said Dr. Liza Johannesson.
The baby is now the ninth baby born in the world from a transplanted uterus, as part of the ongoing study at Baylor joining eight other babies successfully born from transplanted wombs in Sweden.
While three have been unsuccessful and one woman is currently pregnant, the remaining four women are in different stages of the transplant process, and doctors say the baby offers them hope.
"was really something that totally changed my mind about many things I thought were set. People like me, or men in general, don't really talk about this, because we don't know any better, but one thing that we all learned is that we should never have underestimated the need, the will, the wish, of the woman to carry their own pregnancy," Testa said.
Testa added that "It was incredibly special to look into 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 is seeing it happening and you think everything has meaning."
