Such births are extremely rare but not unprecedented, and come after a cutting-edge procedure to transplant a healthy uterus into a woman whose own is damaged or missing.
The baby, a girl weighing 1.845 kilogrammes, was born last Friday, according to the team at the Foch hospital.
“Mother and baby are doing well,” Jean-Marc Ayoubi, head of gynaecology, obstetrics and reproductive medicine at the hospital, told the news agency AFP.
#Naissance du 1er #bébé français venu au monde -de 2 ans après la première #greffe d’utérus réalisée à l’Hôpital Foch par le Pr J.M Ayoubi, chef du service gynécologie-obstétrique & médecine de la reproduction#uterus #france #santé #gynécologie
— Hôpital Foch (@HopitalFoch) February 17, 2021
Crédits photos : Virginie Bonnefon pic.twitter.com/OcXyfRrTfw
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Successful transplant
"Deborah" was born without a uterus as she suffered from a rare condition known as Rokitansky Syndrome, which affects about one in 4,500 women.
She received a uterus transplant in March 2019 – performed by the same team – from her own mother, then aged 57.
“We still had to wait a year to be sure that the transplanted uterus wouldn’t be rejected,” said Ayoubi.
The first round of lockdown brought a halt to all prenatal non-emergency care in France, but the birth took place without any major complications.
Deborah was 33 weeks pregnant when she gave birth, the hospital said.
Second birth possible
The first ever birth after a uterus transplant was in Sweden in 2014.
It came one year after the transplant surgery in a case that was documented in the medical journal The Lancet.
Doctors in Brazil succeeded in 2017 with a birth by a woman who had received a uterus transplant from a donor who had died. The mother in that case suffered from the same disorder as Deborah.
There have had been around 20 births globally after uterus transplants.
Ayoubi said that the transplant in Deborah’s case was not intended to be permanent. The “provisional transplant” as he called it was only meant to allow her to have a child.
However, he stressed it was not unheard of for women with transplanted uteruses to give birth a second time, as has happened several times in Sweden.
Ayoubi’s team have already received permission to continue their work on women born without uteruses, with clinical trials planned on another 10 women with similar conditions.
(AFP)
