2nd woman gives birth after uterus transplant in Türkiye

ANTALYA

A woman has given birth to a baby 14 months after receiving a uterus transplant from a cadaveric donor, marking the second successful case in the country.

A team of 40 people headed by Ömer Özkan, a professor from Akdeniz University, performed a cadaveric uterus transplant into 32-year-old Havva Erdem, who was born without a uterus.

The woman stayed in the hospital for 90 days after an eight-hour operation while she was given IVF treatment to be able to have children.

Erdem, who gave birth at the 29th week of her pregnancy, had a healthy baby girl weighing 1.7 kilograms.

The uterus belonged to a 40-year-old woman whose cerebral death was declared in July 2021. The preparations started by medical teams after her family accepted the organ donation.

“We are congratulating this groundbreaking achievement that happened at Akdeniz University Hospital like the first one,” Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote on his Twitter account.

Özkan and his team transplanted the uterus taken from a cadaver in 2011 for the first time in the world to another patient who gave birth to a baby boy in 2020.

Özkan is also known for conducting Türkiye’s first face and arms transplant operations in the last decade.

The first baby born thanks to a uterus transplant was in Sweden in 2014.

The 36-year-old mother, who was born without a uterus, received a donated womb from a friend in her 60s. The baby was born prematurely and weighed 1.8 kilograms.