Womb Transplant Patient Derya Sert is Pregnant, Confirms Doctor
Derya Sert, deemed a "medical miracle" in August 2011 after becoming the first woman in the world to have a successful womb transplant from a deceased donor, is now pregnant, her doctor, Mustafa Unal, confirmed in an email to Yahoo! Shine.
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“We are glad to inform that she is indeed pregnant. But she is now just at the beginning of the pregnancy period. We hope everything goes well until the end of the pregnancy,” said Unal.
Sert, 22, had undergone in vitro fertilization at Akdeniz University Hospital in Turkey's southern province of Antalya.
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“We were happy after the transplant. We want a healthy child. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl,” said Sert's husband, Mustafa Sert, 35, after the initial operation, according to The Times of London. “With God’s help we will have a baby thanks to this process.” He said the child, if a boy, will be named Omer, after Omer Ozkan, the surgeon whose team performed the transplant.
Sert was born without a uterus (a condition that inflicts 1 in every 5,000 women around the world, according to the American Free Press), and her doctors waited 18 months before implanting an embryo to make sure the foreign organ was still working. Doctors learned the uterus was functioning when Sert began menstruating after the transplant.
Her baby is expected to be delivered via C-section and Sert will have the uterus removed after the birth to avoid complications. Possible health risks include birth defects caused by the immunosuppressive drugs and preterm delivery.
The news is a hopeful breakthrough for the thousands of women unable to have children because they were either born with no uterus or had them removed for medical reasons.
Sert is the second woman to undergo a womb transplant. The first was a woman in Saudi Arabia who received a womb from a living donor, which failed because of heavy clotting. Doctors removed the organ.
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