Ovary-less Woman's Pregnancy Hailed as a First

A world-first procedure offers new hope to women seeking to get pregnant after losing their ovaries. For the first time, ovarian tissue transplanted to a woman's abdomen has led to a successful pregnancy. A woman in Australia identified as Vali had both her ovaries removed while being treated for ovarian cancer, with the second taken out seven years ago. Doctors froze her ovarian tissue; when she wanted to become a mom, they grafted it onto her abdominal wall, first in 2010 and again in 2012, the Guardian reports.

Explains her fertility specialist, "The tissue was put back in the front wall of her abdomen, so that means it's under the skin and the muscle but not inside the abdomen." With what the specialist describes as "very gentle hormone stimulation—not the full-on IVF," two eggs developed. Doctors fertilized them and implanted them in her uterus, the Sydney Morning Herald explains; now, the 24-year-old is 25 weeks pregnant with two girls. Ovarian tissue has previously been grafted back into the pelvis, resulting in 29 births, but this is the first case in which the tissue was placed in a separate location, Time reports. (More in vitro fertilization stories.)