Hundreds Queue Up For Help After Success Of First Uterus Transplant

Galaxy Care Laparoscopy Institute, the hospital where India's first womb transplant took place has been flooded with queries of hopeful women. Officials report that 150 new appointments have already been set up to discuss possibilities of transplant and 75 women and even foreigners have themselves visited the institute to voice uterus related problems that need a solution.

Many women in india are born without a uterus or it may be very small because their reproductive system wasn't fully developed during their mother's pregnancy. Some women also have to get it removed due to complications during pregnancy or other diseases. In such a situation, the option of getting a uterus transplant is a miracle. Doctors at the Galaxy Care hospital performed the complicated 12 hour surgery on May 18 and then another on May 19.

In the first case, the patient was a 21 year old girl from Solapur while in the second, the girl was 26 years old from Baroda, and it was her mother who gave her the womb to allow her to enjoy motherhood in future. Both the girls have started menstruating, which means that the transplant was indeed successful. It remains to be seen if the women will be able to get pregnant since the procedure can only yield results after an year.

While the surgery costs a massive 20 lakhs, the hospital has been able to bring the cost down to 5 lakhs due to help from generous philanthropists and charity events.

However, Dr Shailesh Puntambekar, medical director at the Galaxy Care Laparoscopy Institute, Pune says that as many as 41 patients who visited the hospital were unmarried. The law that governs uterus transplant in India clearly mentions that uterus transplant surgeries can only be performed on married women who are less than 35 years of age and who do not want surrogacy. His hospital has been granted a license from Maharashtra government's Directorate of Health Services to perform the transplant for a period of five years and the doctors are making sure they weed out ineligible aspirants. This comes after the Indian Council of Medical Research raised questions about the validity of performing transplants on patients since till a few months back, the procedure only existed in experimental stage.

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