Uterus transplants: ‘My sister gave me her womb’

Moments after giving birth, her son not yet in her arms, Lolita Wästerlund had an urgent fear. “Does he have a really big nose?” she near screamed. Her partner Patrik, and the doctors and nurses who had performed the caesarean, looked bemused. Almost a year on, Lolita – or Lollo to her friends – shakes her head at the memory. “It’s a funny question, but in one picture during the ultrasound it looked like he had a really, really big nose. But they said: ‘No, his nose is just perfect.’ What a question!”

Few pregnancies are entirely straightforward, but Lollo’s was an especially discombobulating one. It was not the birth so much, though she did experience the dreaded pre-eclampsia and her son arrived hurriedly a few weeks premature. Much more significant was that Lollo herself was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a condition that affects around one in 5,000 girls. MRKH sufferers have ovaries, but no uterus. Lollo also had a shortened vagina and only one kidney. She found out when she was 14, in the early 1990s, when she went...