By Maya Palit
This week will see the first uterus transplant in India. A 26-year-old woman based in Baroda is having a uterus put in that was donated by her 41-year-old mother, because she isn’t keen on surrogacy. She has had three miscarriages and one still birth, and two years ago, was told that her uterus was too damaged to go through another pregnancy. (Other sources report that she has had four abortions and lost two babies after carrying them to term).
The transplant is being done at a hospital in Pune, with a team of 12 members, including a gynaecologist led by the surgeon Shailesh Puntambekar. There are another two transplants lined up as well, including one for a woman who was born without a uterus (apparently one in 4000 women in India are born without one.)
Apparently only 25 uterine transplants have been conducted around the world, but full pregnancies haven’t always been possible for the women who’ve had them done — only ten of the transplants have been successful in that sense. There’s been some apprehension about the safety of the operation because of its high risk, with various gynaecologists indicating that the complex operation isn’t the most ‘practical’ answer to infertility.
Overall reporting around the uterus transplant has tended to fixate somewhat on how the transplants will be magical for the women involved, with the director of a Bangalore-based fertility centre speaking for all women born without a uterus when she says “Experiencing pregnancy and motherhood for those who are born without a uterus is a dream come true.” Then again, she says that there are 31 couples already enrolled for the procedure, and gynaecologists are speculating that in the long run this procedure might become a more frequent phenomenon.