For a woman deprived of a uterus, wear a child was unthinkable twenty years ago. Today, transplant research is slowly turning science fiction into reality. In a few weeks, Déborah Berlioz, born without a uterus, should thus give birth to a second child at the Foch hospital (Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine).
For women without this pocket, which is not vital but essential to pregnancy, it is a huge rising hope. Because if medically assisted procreation (PMA) has made it possible to take care of male infertility, ovulation disorders or pathologies that concern the tubes, women with uterine infertility had to do so until now. idea of not being pregnant. The only alternative: adoption, a complicated course, or surrogacy (GPA), prohibited in France.
One in 4,500 women in France is affected by Rokitansky syndrome (Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser, MRKH), a congenital condition characterized by the absence of a uterus and sometimes an abnormality of the vagina, i.e. around a hundred small girls every year. “These women have to mourn motherhood, and they experience it all the more unfairly because they have a reproductive system, their ovaries are normal, their hormonal cycle is perfect – from the pituitary gland to ovulation – , but the absence of a uterus is synonymous with infertility”, emphasizes Professor Jean-Marc Ayoubi, obstetrician-gynecologist behind the first uterus transplant in France, carried out as part of a research protocol. In March 2019, Déborah Berlioz had received that from her mother. A baby girl was born two years later. A double first in France. A little sister is expected in a few weeks. In September 2022, another transplant took place; this time the 41-year-old donor was the patient’s sister.
A global feat
The way was opened by Mats Brännström, professor of obstetrics gynecology at the hospital in Gothenburg (Sweden). Her first clinical trial resulted in nine transplants, between 2012 and 2013. Two years later, a 35-year-old woman gave birth to a baby boy through the womb of a family friend, aged 61 at the time. years. A world feat, the fruit of more than fifteen years of research. The team has just completed its third clinical trial, and the uterus transplant is expected to enter routine care this year.
It all started in 1998. At the time, Mats Brännström flew to Adelaide (Australia). He has just obtained a research grant in gynecological and oncological surgery. But an encounter will change his trajectory. “I had to tell a young woman in her twenties that hysterectomy [ablation de l’utérus] that she was going to suffer would prevent her from having a child, does he remember. She replied: “I have the solution: you can transplant my mother’s uterus to me.” Honestly, I had never thought of this possibility. »
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