Doctors transplant wombs into 9 women

Part of experiment in Sweden to see if pregnancies can occur after procedure

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Nine women in Sweden have successfully received transplanted wombs donated from relatives in an experimental procedure that has raised some ethical concerns. The women will soon try to become pregnant with their new wombs, the doctor in charge of the pioneering project has revealed.

The women were born without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are in their 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether it’s possible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to their own children.

Life-saving transplants of organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys have been done for decades and doctors are increasingly transplanting hands, faces and other body parts to improve patients’ quality of life. Womb transplants — the first ones intended to be temporary, just to allow child-bearing — push that frontier even farther and raise some new concerns.

There have been two previous attempts to transplant a womb — in Turkey and Saudi Arabia — but both failed to produce babies. Scientists in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere are also planning similar operations but the efforts in Sweden are the most advanced.

“This is a new kind of surgery,” Dr. Mats Brannstrom said from Goteborg. “We have no textbook to look at.”

Brannstrom, chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Gothenburg, is leading the initiative. Next month, he and colleagues will run the firstever workshop on how to perform womb transplants and they plan to publish a scientific report on their efforts soon.

Some experts have raised concerns about whether it’s ethical to use live donors for an experimental procedure that doesn’t save lives. But John Harris, a bioethics expert at the University of Manchester, didn’t see a problem with that as long as donors are fully informed. He said donating kidneys isn’t necessarily life-saving, yet is widely promoted.