One of the first women in the world to successfully deliver a baby after a womb transplant has called for the procedure to be made more widely available to help the large numbers of women affected by uterine factor infertility.
Speaking after the first womb transplant surgery in the UK was reported, Peyton Meave, 29, who lives in Oklahoma, said that having a child through participation in a US trial had been a “life-changing experience”. Having previously been told that pregnancy and childbirth would never be an option, Meave now has a four-year-old daughter, Emersyn.
“I’d love for more women to be able to have that option as another avenue outside surrogacy and adoption,” she said. “One of my desires when participating in the trial was that some day it would help the 15-year-old girl who doesn’t have a uterus, or the woman who has to go through a hysterectomy due to cancer.
“I’m so happy for the woman in the UK and for all the women who are next in line,” she added.
Uterine factor infertility (UFI), where women lack a womb or have womb abnormalities that prevent them from getting pregnant, affects about one in 500 women, the equivalent to about 70,000 women in the UK.
Prof Liza Johannesson, the medical director of the womb transplant team at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where Meave was treated, said: “I’m not saying that every one of these women wants or would be eligible for a uterus transplant, but it’s a massive population. Until now, these women have had two other options: surrogacy or adoption. There has never been anything to treat this condition before.”
Meave has MRKH (Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome), which means she was born with ovaries but no uterus. She was diagnosed at 15 and describes leaving the doctor’s appointment feeling “distraught” that she would never have a period or become pregnant, which at the time felt like “a monumental part of being a woman”.
“At 15, it was more of the feeling of being abnormal than the feeling of not being able to have a family,” she said. “You feel ‘less than’.”
After finishing college and becoming engaged to her now-husband, Adam, she learned of a womb transplant trial taking place at Baylor Medical University Center and, in 2018, signed up to participate. She was not deterred by the potential side-effects of major surgery or immunosuppressant medication – and was aware that a successful pregnancy was not guaranteed. “I was 23 years old and had this feeling of: I’m young and invincible,” she said. “I wanted to experience pregnancy … and to have all of those things that I felt were taken from me from a young age.”
She received her transplanted womb from an altruistic donor, who had seven children of her own, in what Meave describes as the “ultimate selfless gift”. The surgery required a week’s stay in hospital and a “hard recovery”, but just months later, she had her first period, aged 24, which she describes as an emotional moment. “It was confirmation that my body knew what to do,” she said. “It was always meant to do this, I was just born with a birth defect.”
IVF treatment followed, but Meave’s pregnancy was not straightforward. She had unexplained bleeding and then, at 22 weeks, learned that she had an incompetent cervix, a condition in which the cervix begins to open early, risking miscarriage or premature delivery, but which doctors said was unlikely to have been linked to the transplant.
Meave had to go on monitored bed rest and her daughter was delivered at just 30 weeks. “She came out crying, which was amazing,” said Meave. “She’s four now – as busy as can be and super healthy. She’s just the light of our lives.”
Due to the complex pregnancy, and to avoid continuing to take immunosuppressants, Meave has since had the transplant removed. She and her husband are expecting another baby, a son, through a surrogate.
About 80% of the participants in the original Baylor trial have gone on to deliver at least one baby and Johannesson, who was a member of the team that performed the world’s first successful procedure in Sweden, said this figure could increase further as some women are still undergoing treatment. “We’ve now established that it’s very feasible and reproducible,” she said. “There’s a huge demand for this and I hope we’ll be able to deliver this to a lot of women as an option.”
