If you’ve been trying to have a baby but are having problems conceiving, you are not alone. In fact, one in five women is unable to get pregnant after one-year of trying. There are many reasons. The most common cause of female infertility is failure to ovulate.
There are many treatment options, including IVF. But what about those women who suffer from other conditions that are not treatable? What are their options? Until now, they were faced with surrogacy or adoption. But as Ivanhoe reports, there is another way.
Recommended Videos
Finally! Little Indy Pearl Edwards made her appearance in the world. It took her parents three years to reach this moment.
“It’s still surreal to me,” Kayla Edwards, Indy Pearl’s mom, said. “I get to wake up with her every morning and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. You’re mine forever.”
Kayla Edwards was born with uterine-factory infertility. Her uterus just didn’t function correctly.
“Uterine-factory infertility has for a long, long time been considered the last barrier of infertility. These are women that thought that they would never, ever become pregnant and carry a child and they adapted their lives to that, but it was devastating for them,” said Dr. Liza Johannesson, a gynecological surgeon at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
It was an untreatable condition -- until recently.
“A uterine transplantation will give you the ability to carry a pregnancy and to deliver your own child,” Johannesson said.
Johannesson is part of a team studying whether or not a uterine transplant from either a living or deceased donor is a good option for women like Kayla Edwards. They found that out of 33 women who received a transplant, 21 babies have been born.
“When you can actually get them pregnant and then deliver, the amount of joy you, you can’t describe that. It’s fantastic,” Johannesson said.
Three months after her uterine transplant, Kayla Edwards tried her first round of IVF. It didn’t work. Two more rounds, still no pregnancy. Then on their last try, with their last embryo …Kayla said, “I didn’t even think I was pregnant. I had no symptoms. I was like, it didn’t work. And I remember taking a pregnancy test and literally having a panic attack. Like, oh my gosh, we saw the words, pregnant and it was amazing.”
Her pregnancy went as planned and now … Kayla says, “I feel like I’m literally holding a miracle every day.”
The best candidates for a uterine transplant are healthy women between the ages of 20 and 40. After having the baby, women can decide whether to try for a second child or have the transplanted uterus removed.