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First Baby Born To U.S. Uterus Transplant Patient Raises Ethics Questions

A woman who received a uterus transplant recently delivered a healthy baby boy. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with the doctors working on the experiment about its ethics, risk, and cost implications.

Beautiful. Pure. Natural. Medicine at its pinnacle.

Those were the words of Dr. Giuliano Testa this week — the principal investigator of a clinical trial with ten women underway at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

He was talking about the birth of a baby boy to a mother who underwent a uterus transplant last year. It's a first in the U.S., but in Sweden, eight babies have been born to mothers with uterus transplants.

Not everyone is celebrating though.

Dr. Testa and his colleague, Dr. Liza Johannesson, who joined the Baylor team from Sweden earlier this year, spoke with host Kelly McEvers about this development. Excerpts of the interview follow,

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