U.K. first womb transplant

[VestaTilley]

The BBC has reported today that the first womb transplant has taken place in a hospital in England. A 40 year old woman donated her womb to her sister, hopefully enabling her to have children.

AIBU to be concerned about a potential dystopian future where women’s reproductive organs are harvested like car parts?

Journalists are treating this like it’s a positive, with few questions being asked about how the donor is recovering, how the foetus (if the recipient does conceive) will fare if the woman has to continue taking immuno suppressive drugs? Whether there is increased miscarriage risk?

Transplants are supposed to be life saving, not about wish fulfilment. Apparently 10 brain dead women are being lined up for future donation!

To me this all seems part of a bigger picture of surrogacy, synthetic embryo creation (reported earlier this year) and a drive to disassociate women from reproduction and the biology of our sex.

Am I alone in being bothered by this? I wish journalists would look more at the bigger societal picture.

Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66514270

This!

They don't have "10 brain dead women lined up" - the article says that they have been authorised to carry out 15 womb transplants - 10 from brain dead donors, nowhere does it say that these donors are available immediately, much less "lined up".

I'm someone who every year or two goes to visit a person I knew who survived a dreadful accident and is kept alive (PEG fed, sometimes on ventilation) because in a scanner she shows some brain activity. She can't move or communicate or blink or swallow, but she is technically alive and is now expected to continue existing until she's 80 (in 30 years' time) She exists in a high-intensity unit surrounded by others in similar situations — dozens of them. In comas for years. Some never visited, some whose next of kin have died. Each one costs £100-200k pa to keep alive. So why not harvest organs from them? Blood, plasma. Corneas. Eyes, perhaps. A kidney here and there, a uterus from the women who'll never need them, eggs, sperm, bone marrow, perhaps a hand or a foot for someone who's had theirs severed... They won't notice. I'm not advocating this, but I bet someone somewhere is thinking about monetising them.

No need to apologise, excellent way to completely miss the point though.

It's not me who has missed the point. Read the linked thread and learn how wrong you are about the intentions, at least back in 2019.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3605548-Imperial-College-Womb-Transplant-Survey-Redux

You know those men who say there’s no such thing as a biological woman, that our biology doesn’t make us female, but now they literally want our body parts for their ‘validation’? They’re the deluded, misogynistic, logic-less creeps ‘Terfs’ take issue with.

No, we Terven are realists. Gender realists and realists about what a society where 29% of children grow up in poverty should really be focussing on. Which is existing children and not children on someone's 'best life' wish list.

If someone had told me a womb transplant would have fixed my infertility when I was going through it (for 19 years, 10 miscarriages) i would have signed up in a heartbeat and twice on Sundays. In terms of quality of life, there’s nothing I can think of that could improve it more for a couple going through infertility than to hopefully have a child successfully. You really can’t know the pain of it unless you’ve been there.

I hope this woman gets the family she clearly wants more than anything and that she gets the support of every woman IRL she ever meets. I for one am sending her all the luck in the world for her onwards journey.

This thread is not about trans women, it’s about a woman who has received a donor womb from her sister.

And still no-one is talking about the long term negative health implications for the woman who donates her uterus, who could die on the table, or from a post op infection/haemorrhage, who could have problems with bladder and bowel function, who is likely to enter premature menopause (if pre-menopausal) which is linked to an increased risk of dementia/heart disease/osteoporosis, who will die younger as a result of the hysterectomy, who may be left unable to have sex due to pain caused by the scarring, and who will be made infertile as a result of the surgery, or how consent is very much screwed when it's within families, where all sorts of other factors come in to play which may make refusing to donate a choice the woman cannot make. A hysterectomy isn't simple. We're not plug and play like Mrs Potato Head. It has well documented long term negative health implications. None of this is mentioned in any of the articles.

And this ^ x 100.

So many women on here have had to fight to get a hysterectomy for gynae problems and yet apparently having an unnecessary hysterectomy to maybe (who knows, IVF success rates are still pretty low) create a baby for another person is a cause for celebration? I despair really. Hopefully the older sister won't quickly experience the perimenopausal hell that many of us have/are experiencing. I wouldn't have risked that at 40. (And my sister wouldn't have wanted me to.)

@SunsetBeauregarde and other doubters:

The research team also lied about those intentions, when asked. They said to Posie Parker/Kellie Jay Keen, I quote:

"The answer is an easy no. We will never even consider performing womb transplants in men. This is not possible, legal, nor do I think there is a demand for it".

While at the same time they were telling MTF trans people that they thought it would be possible and moreover that it would be mandated to happen under the Equality Act as anything else would be discriminatory.

I think you’ll find implants into men have been mentioned several times already and is a concern for many women.

i agree, we SHOULD be focusing on existing children and not on culture wars about stuff that hasn’t, will not and cannot ever (biologically) happen.

Instead though, the feminism boards are flooded with completely irrelevant trans threads because it’s more fun to be outraged than it is to actually drive meaningful conversations about change.

Mentioned by this thread yes, that’s exactly my point. There has been no suggestion at all that this is on the cards or even possible (which it’s not).

We all have a right to speak, @SunsetBeauregarde. You make your points, and others will do likewise.

It already has happened before 🙄

Loads of things weren’t possible until they were.

In terms of quality of life, there’s nothing I can think of that could improve it more for a couple going through infertility than to hopefully have a child successfully. You really can’t know the pain of it unless you’ve been there.

I went through infertility and never had a child. But I have made my peace with it and enjoy my life now. I think we need to get away from this way of thinking that not being able to have a child is the worst possible thing that can happen to a woman and that it justifies anything and everything to prevent it.

Have you got a source for that last paragraph?

There has been no suggestion at all that this is on the cards or even possible

Yes there has. By the same charity and at least some of the same surgical team.

The Telegraph article is a bit odd. However, this brought me up short. It seems as if the expectation is that developments in transplantation for women will eventually result in uterus implants for men/transgender women.

Professor Mats Brannstrom, the chief physician at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who made history in 2014 after he delivered the world’s first uterus transplant baby, said he gets many enquiries from transgender women.
“I get emails from people all over the world,”

It's a topic that is frequently raised in discussions about reproductive justice and that is a growing theme in the NHS. It would be useful to discuss this in that context at some point.

And as for no suggestion, I suggest you actually educate yourself on this topic. The link I posted from the Time is a starting point to demonstrate there IS a desire for this.

Have you got a source for that last paragraph?

Yes, it's in one of their papers. Hold on.

I’m glad you made your peace, I couldn’t. I contemplated and eventually attempted suicide a number of times over 19 years because I felt my life had no purpose if I couldn’t have a child. No mental health problems, I was completely lucid.

I think it’s acceptable to assume people have differing levels of strength of feeling around this particular topic and the drive to have children is as individual as anything else. ‘Making your peace with it’ may well have worked for you, it was never an option for me.

Thanks!

body gestational donation. Aka surrogacy with brain dead women!!

Just imagine finding out that's how you were born.

Why? Why would that happen? There are thousands of people who need kidneys and die waiting for a transplant. There aren’t mass cases of women being kidnapped and having their kidney removed and the recipients die waiting so why would there be for a womb?