On February 12, Deborah, the first woman to have received a uterus transplant in France, gave birth to her first child. A little girl named Misha.
A medical feat. Friday February 12, at the Foch hospital in Suresnes, a small Misha, weighing 1.8 kilograms, opened her eyes for the first time, reports AFP and France Inter. If there are thousands of births every day in France, this one is very special. Her mother, Deborah, 36, is the first French woman to have a uterine transplant in 2019.
Suffering from Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH), the young mother was born without a uterus. Also called utero-vaginal aplasia, this anomaly affects about one in 4,500 women.
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In two years, a transplant and a baby
In 2018, after ten years of research, the team of Professor Jean-Marc Ayoubi at Foch Hospital finally obtained authorization to remove the uterus from a living donor. Regarding Deborah's transplant, it was her mother Brigitte who donated her uterus to her. The surgery took place on March 31, 2019. Deborah then had to wait several months before trying to get pregnant. During the summer of 2020, the embryo transfer, conceived with the young woman's oocyte and her husband's sperm, was finally implanted in the transplanted uterus. Deborah gave birth to her baby at 7.5 months of pregnancy.
The medical prowess of Professor Jean-Marc Ayoubi's team is a nice message of hope to all women born without a uterus, with a non-functional uterus or who have undergone a hysterectomy (a surgical act that involves removing the uterus, in particular due to a cancerous tumor). While this is a great first in France, around the world, around 20 babies have already been born after uterine transplants, notably in Sweden and the United States. Deborah's journey can be seen on the Zone Interdite program on M6, Sunday February 21.