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

Why is it that some people ONLY think as far as their eyes can see?
Why is it that some people don't bother researching certain things?
Maybe read the whole thread, you may find some answers.

Yes of course, again you’ve not understood the context - that part of any research paper is a discursive section on feasibility of further research. ‘No clinical reason why it shouldn’t be’ is research short hand for ‘at this stage there’s no outright physiological reason why we couldn’t transplant a womb into a man’ - what it doesn’t mean and what you’re trying to suggest it means is ‘we should transplant wombs into men because it will allow them to have babies’.

I think that fundamentally where the confusion has come from here.

Yes of course, again you’ve not understood the context - that part of any research paper is a discursive section on feasibility of further research. ‘No clinical reason why it shouldn’t be’ is research short hand for ‘at this stage there’s no outright physiological reason why we couldn’t transplant a womb into a man’ - what it doesn’t mean and what you’re trying to suggest it means is ‘we should transplant wombs into men because it will allow them to have babies’.

In the pack given to the survey participants, they discuss how they could have babies in some detail, and also the "cyclical regime" of hormones that will allow them to experience periods, they suggest.

You obviously don't understand medical research very well

Well that may be the case for you, but for others here, myself included, it is possible to see that while I may want something, there may be valid reasons as to why I can't have it. It's the same with other things too , though this one may be wanted more intensely. The principle is the same.

I wonder if the immunosuppressants required long term are funded privately or by the NHS.
And whether or not the removal of the uterus after two years is also funded privately or by the NHS - after all, by then it will be imperative it is removed due to the health risks of the continuous immunosuppressants required by the recipient.
And if the recipient manages to get pregnant, twice, as planned, will those pregnancies be fully funded privately or by the NHS?
And if the babies that are born are born prematurely, and/or otherwise affected detrimentally due to the fetal toxicity of the immunosuppressives they will be exposed to for the whole pregnancy - will all of that be funded privately or by the NHS? You can’t give up your time and resources for free only at the weekends to look after a premature baby in a NICU after all…

If you’re interested, surrogacy was my line. I did consider it for a long time when I was younger, probably about 5 years into trying but as I grew older I understood that my only route for surrogacy from the U.K. would have been effectively paying someone to carry a child. My personal politics by that time meant the morality of this was my line in the sand and I would have rather died. It’s alarming now how matter of fact I was about it all. As I say, totally lucid.

We also looked into adoption, fostering etc. For reasons I won’t go into we couldn’t have IVF or IVI. we were part way through the adoption process (early stages) when I fell pregnant in 2020. Having had a lot of miscarriages I thought nothing of it really, but this baby stuck around long enough for them to agree to a cerclage procedure and my gorgeous little boy is now 2, and we have continued with the adoption process for his sibling who will be joining our family soon .

All I know for certain is that poor women from poor countries are going to end up selling their wombs to rich women from rich countries. (And most of the money will go to middlemen.)

Do you have links for where people are actively looking, or even thinking, about performing womb transplants into transgender women? Because that isn't what anything posted here, or elsewhere, says. Admittedly, you need an understanding of reading research papers and some people may see the discussion points at the end of papers to mean that it's actually being considered.

Yes, this would be to understand the hypothetical tolerance for treatment long term in order to achieve the desired womb transplant and the cost benefit relationship. It is a hypothetical (for want of a better word) ‘guesstimate’ about what treatment might involve to try and gain a realistic understanding of whom their treatment of this nature would be palatable. As it happens I think it’s flawed, given that if you ask a trans person if they’d cut off a leg in order to have a vagina they’d probably say yes, such is the dogma unfortunately.

Again though this does not mean this kind of treatment would actually work - it’s never been studied or tested. It’s just guessing.

Again though this does not mean this kind of treatment would actually work - it’s never been studied or tested. It’s just guessing.

Yes, I know. Why do you think this womb transplant charity and Imperial College carried out this research? And why did they lie about it when asked?

Hello! Person with a life-saving kidney transplant here!

Few points:

• immunosuppressant therapy doesn't cause birth defects. There is one medication called MMF which does, but it can be easily replicated with those that don't, should you wish to become pregnant.

• if you have dramatically removed your name from the organ donor list in response to this, I truly hope you never have to experience the devastating slow decline of one of your vital organs, as your body slowly dies in front of you and your only hope is making it to the top of a list with a multitude of deciding factors in your way. Best of luck!

• I don't know what horror films you've been watching, or urban legends you've been hearing around the campfire, but people don't wake up in ice baths with harvested organs.

• all organ donations come from brain dead donors. If they were dead, their organs would be useless. Although they're working on this - yay science!

• mumsnet is fucking mental sometimes.

An upside would be better maternity care and pain relief, CS would be seen as the surgery that it is with adequate after care.

But, yes, I'm very sceptical about what the ultimate aim for this was.

all organ donations come from brain dead donors.

Can't you have a kidney donation from a living donor?

They didn't lie.

If women don’t want to donate their uterus, they are fully entitled to that view, no emotional blackmail should be applied to them, it’s not going to save anyone’s life. If women remove themselves from the register because they can’t opt out of donating their uterus, then there’s a problem WITH THE REGISTER, not women.

@MissKittyFantastico84, globally people don't wake up with their organs missing? Yes they do. Women have babies cut out of them, families have children stolen. Look at the case of the human body sculptor Von Hagen's, it came to light that he didn't have consent. You can buy anything from mental institutions in some countries. Where families get away with honour killings, locking women up and putting them into asylums (as they still are in these countries), this is going to add another element to exploitation.

Exactly. Amend the register to make it possible to refuse specifically and unalterably to donate any part of the reproductive system, and a good few women would be back on it.

They didn’t lie - they said there was no suggestion that anyone at any point was suggesting transplanting a womb into a man - this is true.

I think the charity and the researchers conducted this research in order to transplant wombs into biological women with mechanical reasons for infertility related to the function of their womb.

If you’re referring to the research about asking trans women if they want a womb transplant in a survey, any scientific research that is funded has a duty to demonstrate how it has made efforts to avoid discrimination, and investigated all possible applications for the research. Again it is in no way an indication that this is anything other than criterial fulfilment.

To people gleefully telling me I'm too thick to understand how research papers work, well that may well be but I'm going to treat it a bit like "sex and gender are more complicated than your GCSE biology class" and continue to wonder why this qualitative research was ever carried out by a serious research institution and this womb transplant charity, if there was no intention whatsoever to seriously look at the feasibility of womb implants into "trans women" (males) and why (given that it was all purely theoretical) they chose to lie about it when directly asked.

Feel free to speculate.

Yes they did lie.

There was a paper. And a survey. Then a paper based on that survey. There have been other papers by other researchers.

On the register you can either tick Donate all my organs and tissue or you can choose. The list to choose from includes: heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, corneas, pancreas, tissue, small bowel. Did these women understand that if they ticked all it would include the reproductive organs? I think many may assume that ‘all’ would include all in the above list. If you tick all, does it mean they could harvest eggs too?

They didn’t lie when asked.

I have explained why this kind of research was undertaken.

No one, at any point, has insinuated you’re anything other than an intelligent person asking good questions. Showing you where you’ve misunderstood something is not calling you thick, there is no point discussing these kinds of topics if you start from a position of misunderstanding. Misunderstanding is no indicative of a lack of intelligence or education, but correcting a misunderstanding relies on you actually wanting to understand better. If you’re happier with ignorant outrage.. I guess crack on?

When?