When they were offered to meet them together, Brigitte Mikolajczyk and Déborah Berlioz did not hesitate for a second. Same blue eyes, same smile… the resemblance is striking. But what unites the mother to her daughter goes far beyond these physical similarities.
The first donated her uterus to the second. To imagine that Misha, who passes from the arms of her mother to those of her grandmother on this December day, developed in the same womb as her mother more than two years ago is no longer fiction but good from reality.
We are in 2002. At the time, Déborah Berlioz was a top athlete. She is part of the French synchronized swimming team. She is 17 years old, does twenty hours of sport per week. And worries about not getting her period. Consultations, medical examinations… The diagnosis falls: “You don’t get your period, because you don’t have a uterus!” », he means a gynecologist. Déborah suffers from Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a congenital malformation that deprives her of this essential organ for carrying a baby. “It was a cold shower. I was devastated. It’s as if I had a black hole in my stomach. I was crying nonstop”she recalls.
On the Internet, Jean-Luc Mikolajczyk, the swimmer’s father, discovers that researchers from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) have managed to give birth after a uterus transplant in mice. “We said to ourselves, when I am old enough to want children, there may be solutions for me”said Deborah.
Brigitte Mikolajczyk immediately offers to give him her uterus. “It was obvious. Even if the doctors assure you that you have nothing to do with it, I told myself that I had done things wrong. And I thought about it every month, when I had my period. »
Déborah continues her rhythm, studies-training, does not speak about it to anyone except her boyfriend at the time. “I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I tried to put all that in a corner of my head and then little by little, it settled in like gangrene. I lost confidence in myself. I didn’t feel entirely female. I had been deprived of the choice of having or not having a child. »
Eating disorders, hospitalizations, return to training… one day the young woman said “stop”. At 21, she left the competition. And a few years later began therapy. In the meantime, she met Pierre, her future husband. And at 29, in 2014, the question of the child resurfaces.
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