Baby born from dead donor womb transplant in UK first

As I’ve shown you, it’s just not possible. You’re upset by an impossibility.

Sometimes there's no obvious logic, and it's hard to articulate, but it just feels "wrong".

I worry what kind of pressure families are put under to make difficult decisions quickly, when the recipient needs the organ as "fresh" as possible.

Agreed but there are plenty of drs eager to " help" kids with damaging surgery and treatment

Of course I don't feel as though any woman should feel guilt, but we do if there's anything that goes wrong or there's anything that causes distress to the baby.

There are plenty of women who do not ever want children who I imagine would be happy to donate.

what makes the womb different to a heart? Or lung? There’s no difference

I don’t see it any differently to say a woman who needed a kidney or liver transplant etc to be able to safely have a pregnancy?

TRAs might well broach it, but it’s just not possible, for multiple medical and scientific reasons.

Men are not designed to have babies.

I agree that somehow it feels different to a kidney or a heart, which are just pumps and filters. They feel less emotive? Whereas the thing you literally build your baby in feels...more personal, in a weird way, almost like donating your face.

Personally I don't have an issue with dead donor uterus transplants if (and only if!) the dead woman explicitly consented to donate that particular organ. But I would never want to donate my own uterus, and I have concerns around live donation given it's an organ only women have. Seeing the way other reproductive donations by women are monetised worldwide, and how women are pressured into them, the ethics worry me.

As far as I can tell it hasn’t been attempted yet. The charities have only been given legally binding permission to do it on women, and they have stated they cannot and will not be taking part in this type of procedure for the “foreseeable future”

https://wombtransplantuk.org/fact-sheet/the-potential-for-operations-for-transgender-women

Some of the recipients of donated wombs will have been born without a functioning womb and others will have lost their womb as a result of serious medical conditions including endometriosis and cancer.
These two approved series of operations, which follow over 25 years of ethically approved and exhaustive clinical research, must be completed and then carefully evaluated, and peer reviewed, strictly in line with the provisions of our permissions.
The UK Womb Transplant Research Team is fully aware and respectful of the 2010 Gender Equality Act that mandates equal care for transgender women, assuming technical feasibility. However it is abundantly clear from all recent experience and research that technical feasibility for a safe and successful operation for a transgender female, together with the possibility of sustaining a successful pregnancy, does not currently exist and that many years of detailed medical research will be required before this might become a viable and safe option.

It’s just the same as someone donating their heart, liver, eyes, etc.

This is exactly the kind of thing that medical science should be doing. Look at the joy it’s brought already.

This is a very, very long way off it at all possible. Outcomes for very premature babies are still quite poor. We simply can’t replicate the conditions inside a live human body.

Am I right to be concerned about these 15,000 women of reproductive age as per this quote from the newspaper article today? I do hope that the Professor is talking about biological women.

Prof Smith, who was at the birth, said the development of the programme depends on funding.
“Both the living and deceased programmes have got capacity for expansion,” he said. “We’re constrained mainly by cash.”
“Probably, we know 5,000 women in the UK are born with no womb, but we also know there’s probably about 15,000 women of reproductive age who would potentially like to have a womb,” he added.

As this is a sex and gender discussion thread, is anyone going to broach the possibility of this transplant being performed on someone not born female? Well I've broached it now, so someone has.

Organ donation always makes me feel queasy but this is amazing and if you’ve agreed to donate your womb at death how wonderful it is to now be part of a new life. I wouldn’t be describing any child as a Frankenstein project either that comment was too bad.

I was responding to you saying how would they feel (and could they forgive themselves) if something went wrong and the baby died. This is sadly pretty common in all pregnancy - do you think they should feel worse/ differently to people who miscarry after IVF?

Okay but it’s been done multiple times safely? I would assume the doctors who are carrying out these procedures know a lot more about it than you do.

If all parties consent and are healthy, why do you care?

I'm glad there are safe drugs. There are other complications with surgery of this magnitude and while kidney transplant is a major operation, you arent trying to grow a human inside it

Not particularly, as far as I know. That wasn’t the point I was making.

So where do you draw the line?

corneas are fine, lungs aren’t?

the donor consented to organ donation. The recipient had it funded privately by a charity pursuing medical research. There are women in America who have had multiple children via womb transplant. When you’ve had two, they remove it via hysterectomy at the same time as the c section.

I am really struggling to see why anyone would be against this?

Huh?

the baby was conceived using the parents’ egg and sperm. The womb has nothing to do with that.

I would imagine the wombs of post menopausal women or women like me who’ve had caesareans and have wombs full of scar tissue wouldn’t be suitable? So young women’s wombs are probably the ones that would be being transplanted for 30k a pop. I’d imagine like surrogacy it starts very medically and ethically and it quickly becomes a way of exploiting poor women in other countries who have little/ no choice. Happy to be proved wrong though if you could grow a healthy baby in the donated womb of a 80 year old who died peacefully surrounded by grandchildren.

I was mainly referring to surgical and physiological complications, which can often happen some time after surgery and not be immediately obvious.

In what sense do they have another family? Do children born to recipients of other organs have “another family”? As the article says: “A baby born following the transplantation of a womb from a deceased donor does not have any genetic links with the donor.” This baby grew and developed inside its own mother’s body.

More safe drugs than not. Of my regime there was only one drug that wasn’t pregnancy safe that was easily switched out. No harm to either of my children

Soooo my kidney donor now lives abroad and my children have only met her a handful of times. But all my blood went through her kidney while I was pregnant with each of them, my blood pressure was managed by her kidney while they were growing.

Are you saying they have some form of attachment to her which will negatively impact them in life as she is not part of their immediate family? Bizarre