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

It's now 90 years later and medicine has moved on hugely. Einar died of an infection after surgery, when antibiotics weren't available.

It's not certain, of course, that any such procedure would be successful or even safe today or in 10 of 20 years' time.

I doubt that that will stop doctors trying, however.

Why do you think it was at a private theatre in a private hospital? OUH NHS Trust themselves state the below quoted passage on their website. Why do you think they would they bother going to the trouble of clearly stating it was carried out when NHS patients were not using using NHS facilities if it was done in a private hospital?
(Spoiler: They wouldn't)

"The surgical team was co-led by surgeons at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust.
Both the donor operation and subsequent transplant took place at the Oxford Transplant Centre at OUH's Churchill Hospital. The two procedures overlapped and together took almost 18 hours. The operations took place on a Sunday in early 2023 when NHS facilities were not being used by NHS patients. The whole surgical and anaesthetic team volunteered and took part in their own time."

See my post. NHS Theatres are regularly used by private health care (especially for high risk surgeries as few private hospitals have the facilities needed). The NHS is paid (heavily) for their use.

The whole surgical and anaesthetic team volunteered and took part in their own time.

Wow, thats generous. Do they do that for anyone else? Like, someone needing life saving surgery?

I’m aware of that. But that isn’t what the PP. They said it was in a private theatre in a private hospital. It wasn’t.

Because all research conducted HAS to explore all applications of that research. So research into womb transplants has to explore the possibility that that research may be called on to inform womb transplants into men. It is not suggesting it’s going to happen or anyone is likely to try it, it’s saying there’s an application of this research that impacts on this idea. Again, semantics is important.

To back this up.

The funding for the research is dependent on all boxes being ticked. So yes, they have to explore it all. When you look at it, they have done the bare minimum to tick that box which, to me, reiterates that there is no real interest in transplanting into trans women.

I am a scientist. I write research papers all the time. Researchers put speculative comments in the discussion section of research papers usually because they believe that the topic in question may be possible at some point, and this gets published because the reviewers of the paper believe the same.
i find your arguments disingenuous. You don’t come across as someone with any real experience in writing scientific papers, possibly you have done so in social science arena which is quite different. And your continued mention of toddlers and nipple tasked is crass, distasteful and very telling.

*Tassels

The fact the press is picking this up with sensationalist headlines is as infuriating as it is predictable - understanding how to read research papers should be a required part of journalism degrees.

I can’t help feeling this has come out of a certain type of pioneering surgeons’ need for achievement. A massive ego shot and professional recognition. Rather than meeting the needs of women, which is never, ever a driving force for revolutionary medical advances (or the cash to make them happen).

Where are the pioneering advances in pregnancy and maternity care? Prolapse and birth injury? Incontinance?

Women (and babies) in this case appear to be the necessary materials. But I’d argue this surgery isn’t the huge benefit to women of the future we’re being told. And the opportunity for exploitation is being glossed over with a thick veneer of sentiment and gushing about happy future mummies.

Medical field, fairly closely related as it happens. I have no doubt the researchers believe it could be possible in the future, but you yourself will agree it is no indication of active research or any intent to progress, especially when the research in question is a minimum effort survey.

Toddlers and nipple tassels was deliberately crass and distasteful, that was the entire point. Not sure what that ‘tells’ you.

As I’ve said, I’m completely gender critical but I find taking this kind of news completely out of context and extrapolating it to the extremes seen on this thread completely baffling. What I’m attempting to do is ground the conversation back in reality rather than letting it spin off into the trans debate where it doesn’t belong. There are much more important fronts we need to fight from trans ideology, this is not one of them.

Equally, taking the news a consenting woman has donated her womb to her sister in the U.K. and peeling off into ‘Ive left the donor register’ is alarming and I’m keen anyone here who doesn’t have the same background as you and I has an equal opportunity to understand the comments in the research in full context so that the alarmists among us don’t go unchallenged.

You equally have knowledge of the field and therefore great context to add here which may well contradict my summarisation - I encourage you to do that. The more genuine debate we can have and the less alarmist nonsense, the better.

For what it’s worth, I do think there are some genuine ethical conundrums about transplanting wombs, my main issues though are around how drastically under researched and under funded women’s health research is generally and how as a result of that, our understanding of the long term impacts of this on both women and children born from transplanted wombs may vary and whether actually, funding for this research is doing more harm than good in a field where actual research pounds are thin on the ground as it is.

If they are brain dead they aren't "still alive"

I couldn’t agree more here, this is exactly my unease. Particularly since the actual number of women suffering infertility for a reason that could be fixed by a womb transplant is such a tiny percentage overall. The majority of infertility is endocrine rather than mechanical in nature, so it just feels like a swing and a miss somehow?

You’ve articulated it better than I can!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37122083/

"AbstractBackground: Uterus transplantation (UTx) is one of the potential methods to cure absolute uterine factor infertility of transgender. However, this mostly comes with many technological challenges.
Methods: Left inguinal UTx was performed in 13 castrated male rats..."

I'm curious how you'll explain away this experiment.

Yes as a few people have mentioned on the thread, the team we’ve been talking about who are involved in this case are not the only research team investigating womb transplants. This Chinese team for instance went as far as testing womb transplants in castrated rats. It’s worrying how much of the research in this field is carried out in places with dubious human rights records. This is an example of a genuine topic we should be talking about, but given the transplants saw significant apoptosis I’m guessing that’s why this research didn’t get much fanfare. We’d much rather vilify a woman trying to overcome infertility and try and push headlines about it to further the trans culture war than talk about something genuinely worrying that’s happening in the abstract (to us).

I don't think people are trying to vilify this women and her sister but are debating the potential unintended negative consequences on women as a result of this development. This is not using it to further a trans culture war, but fighting for the rights of women less fortunate than we are and for future generations of women, which is what I thought feminism was largely about.

I don't have a problem donating to a close female family member, I do have a problem if it goes to a man...

I've already withdrawn from the donor register because I saw this coming. I've told my relatives not to consent to any organ donation either.

Organ donation from me that is.

And i completely agree that womb transplant opens up doors for women to be exploited around the world, but I dont agree that the main threat here is trans women, it's other biological women. This is the aspect I think is exploiting the reality of this situation for the trans culture war - the most abstract threat from this development is the idea that biological men might recieve womb transplants in the future yet it is overwhelmingly the most discussed. The most pressing threat is the implications this research has for women at risk of abuse, or the focus on organ transplant when there are other areas of fertility research with the potential to benefit millions of women rather than the thousands globally that could benefit from womb transplants. I personally feel there's a much more important discussion to be had about that rather than the, at this stage, completly unfeasable possibility that women could have their wombs stolen to be transplanted into men.

I'm very interested to understand what the consensus here is on egg donation - do people feel the same way about donating eggs to couples struggling with infertility and if not, why is that? I don't feel egg donation crosses my personal 'line', but I can't articulate why.

this.

Gosh this thread really has brought all the misogynists to the yard!

Hysterical, pearl clutching, idiotic, crazed ...and stupid apparently!

First prize for misogyny has to go to 'who cares?' in response to a concern about the older sister potentially going into early menopause.

Coercion can absolutely occur in families. I would not be at all convinced that the older sister here has been subtly coerced by her family since it was known she was fertile and her sister wasn't. The dynamics in a family where one child has a serious health condition can be very complex.

As we have seen clearly on this thread, infertility can make some women very mentally unwell.

I think that's a reference to me and infertility can indeed be devastating. I'd just like to clarify I wasn't mentally unwell though, I was completely lucid, I just didn't see any point in continuing my life (as it was) if I wasn't going to be able to have a child, given that my motivation for everything I'd ever done up until that point was to provide for my family. At the time, if that family couldn't happen i wasn't interested in life childless. I'm not saying this way of thinking was healthy, far from it, but I wasn't in crisis and did not have any mental health issues to speak of, just a lack of interest in continuing to live.

As for misogyny - it IS a disproportionate response to take yourself off the donor register when it has nothing to do with womb transplants in response to this news story. It's also hysterical at best and disingenuous fearmongering at worst to suggest women will have their wombs stolen at will to be transplanted into men in response to the news that 2 consenting women have undergone the proceedure for the first time in the UK. It's not misogyny to point out a woman's response to something is hysterical when her response to something is hysterical.

@SunsetBeauregarde yes! so well articulated