BRUSSELS, Belgium – “It’s a dream,” proclaimed the beaming 32-year-old new mother Friday as she cuddled her day-old baby girl, born following a pioneering ovarian tissue transplant performed after the woman was made infertile by chemotherapy.
Doctors hailed the breakthrough procedure, saying it sent a “big message of hope” to cancer patients who have lost their fertility and could one day allow women to delay motherhood beyond menopause.
“I am very happy, it’s what I always wanted,” said Ouarda Touirat, who presented her healthy 8-pound, 3-ounce baby, Tamara at a news conference at Brussels’ Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital, where she was born Thursday night.
Touirat, became infertile after she underwent chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1997 when she was 25.
Dr. Jacques Donnez, head of the Department of Gynecology and Andrology at the hospital, said the breakthrough gave cancer survivors a second chance at motherhood.
“It is a big message of hope for all women with cancer who have to have chemotherapy,” he said of the procedure, in which doctors cut out Touirat’s ovarian tissue before she had chemotherapy, then froze it in liquid nitrogen. Five years after she was cleared of cancer, the tissue was grafted back onto her fallopian tubes, allowing for a natural pregnancy.
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