Nation's first baby born from transplanted womb

XI'AN -- A woman who successfully received a womb donated by her mother after a uterus transplant in November 2015 gave birth to a healthy baby boy in northwest China's Shaanxi Province on Sunday.

Weighing 2 kg and measuring 48 cm long, the baby is considered to be China's first and the world's 14th baby who was born from a transplanted womb, said doctors with the Xijing Hospital in Xi'an, where the baby was born and the previous uterus transplant was performed.

Twenty-six-year-old Yang Hua, the new mother, was born without a uterus but has her own ovaries which produce eggs.

When the mother-daughter womb transplant, also China's first human womb transplant, was done in 2015, Yang was 22 and her mother was 43.

Uterus transplants are not new. In the 1960s, Britain and the United States began to experiment with uterus transplants on animals.

In 2000, the world's first human womb transplant took place on a 26-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia. The transplanted uterus failed after three months and had to be removed.

In 2011, doctors successfully performed a uterus transplant on a woman in Turkey. Two years later, nine women in Sweden successfully received transplanted wombs donated by relatives.

Chen Biliang, director of the obstetrics and gynecology department of Xijing Hospital, said uterus transplants still remain a medical challenge in the world today.

The uterus, with plenty of tenuous blood vessels, grows in the depths of a woman's pelvic cavity. Therefore, a string of problems including cutting, the structure of the blood vessels during the transplant and strong rejection reactions may occur, said Chen.

There are about one million women in China who are suffering from uterine infertility. Due to the limitation of the current assisted reproductive technology and the prohibition of surrogacy in many countries, uterus transplants have provided an effective way for women plagued by uterine infertility to have their own babies, according to Chen.