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 interesting that in the study the Chinese team did in rats saw significant cell death because of this very problem.

I suspect it will be a blood supply taken with the uterus and rigged up somewhere. Again, it is a major vessel and that leaves a major weakness in that patients cardio vascular system.

Obv a female is highly likely to have an existing fit for purpose blood vessel so the risk is reduced. Still a risk, but less so.

The mention of blood flow more generally is interesting - when women are pregnant their blood volume increases and there are a ton of other weird pregnancy things that happen as a result of a pregnancy that we don’t fully understand the mechanism for beyond ‘something to do with hormones’. There’s so many things about being pregnant that exist in this murky area between what is researched and knowable and what is not researched and possibly not even knowable.

I was having a discussion once with a religious man who was trying to explain how he saw the interaction between science and religion and he said ‘the things that we don’t know or can’t know through science is where God lives. His space to roam may be shrinking, but there will always be a place for him for humanity’ and that stuck with me. It applies here - there are many many things about pregnancy that we just don’t know and can’t know, where the scientific understanding does not expand further than ‘this has happened because she is pregnant’. There are literally hundreds of processes in the pregnant body that we would just have no way of replicating in a body not built to sustain a pregnancy, because we don’t even know they exist fully.

That just sounds like lazy excuses for not funding research into women's health.

Agreed, there’s no money in it, that’s the issue.

@SunsetBeauregarde I (and many trans people I meet through work) believe that TRA’s are actively damaging the trans community (purposefully in some cases) by saying incendiary and outrageous things on the internet for clout and that their views don’t reflect the majority of the trans community.

This is a point I regularly make as I can see the difference between people with gender dysphoria and males with paraphilias. Sadly too many women are captured with the Be Kind message.

Don't worry people, climate change will kill us off before they start any meaningful experiments on implanting uteruses (uteri?) in men.

yes. We discuss this very regularly in both the threads around uterus transplants such as this one, surrogacy (because of the degree of unknown risks and so many people taking it for granted that the mother will be fine, women do it every single day). Plus in threads about males feeding secretions from their breasts to infants. Because so little is still known about the very real interactions between breast feeding mother and their infant.

The lack of knowledge, even basic knowledge, that the general male population has about the mother-child interactions does feed into this breezy belief that they should get wombs and have babies or they should breastfeed whatever the substance is that they secrete. (And by that I mean that no research has been done on the hormone, chemical content of that substance and what potential immediate, short term and long term side effects.) Yet, endocrinologists are providing this 'service' to males ? Why? Why is the research not into gaining a much deeper understanding about the female body? And yet it is.

I suspect it will be a blood supply taken with the uterus and rigged up somewhere. Again, it is a major vessel and that leaves a major weakness in that patients cardio vascular system.

Obv a female is highly likely to have an existing fit for purpose blood vessel so the risk is reduced. Still a risk, but less so.

Yes, they say exactly that in the Imperial College paper. They would need to take several blood vessels and connections. They say that it would probably be best with a deceased donor organ, but they speculate that "trans men" might be prepared to take the extra risk. Which is something else I found quite chilling. In and of itself.

I think you are blaming the wrong people here, @Tacocatgoatcheesepizza . People have beliefs that need to be respected. Donating organs is a gift, it should not be an expectation. Or done under pressure. This is a very serious concern many women on this thread have. It's a very serious topic, and a very private decision, and you shouldn't be shaming anyone. The ones who to blame are the idiot scientists who wasted precious funds on this stupid and self-indulgent idea, instead of concentrating on REAL issues like cancer, HIV, etc etc. That funding when to something so stupid and pointless and self-indulgent is infuriating. You're blaming and castigating the wrong people.

You don't understand. It's the fact that however tiny, it exists at all. And it is a RISK that any deceased woman on the register might have their womb removed. Even if tiny, it's still a risk, so therefore a genuine risk. And many of us women do not want to even be in that position that we may be one of that 'tiny' few. It's not a 'mindset', it's a genuinely held belief. And you don't seem to understand that belief, nor respect the sincerity of that belief. Please try and respect people's genuinely held beliefs, even if it isn't the same as yours.

This isn’t a risk currently though, given that registering to allow your womb to be harvested is a totally separate register. I agree that in the future if the harvesting and transplanting of wombs becomes commonplace then the register would need addressing, but this is currently not the case.

@SunsetBeauregarde you say,
"Of course, client journalism such as it is in the U.K. is all too happy to amplify the trans debate because it benefits their clients enormously; in the depressing words of 30p Lee: the election strategy will be to create a culture war about trans people and immigrants."

But it's not just what you call the "client media" that are amplifying messages such as the possibility of womb implants (they call them transplants), it's trans campaigning media like Pink News .

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/08/23/trans-womb-transplants-years-away/

https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/05/11/trans-uterus-transplant-pregnancy/

Trans campaigning media is also client journalism, just different clients.

Currently. However at the rates governments around the world have pandered to mens rights under the guise of trans and have removed womens rights, even re-defining us as a sex class, I do not governments on this. I say this very sadly, as I've always been up for donating my organs. When it comes to women-specific issues, I don't trust governments at all. I'm not in the UK so will have to check up on my country's procedures on this, but I will certainly remove myself if this is remotely looked at where I am. I am sorry to any potential recipients, but it is far too great a risk to me and my sincerely held beliefs.

Pink News is not aiming to "create a culture war", though.

Its objectives are entirely different.

Are they?

It seems to me they’re pushing a narrative the same way the daily Mail does. Different motivations i grant you.

Pink News (or Prick News, as some of us refer to it as, due to their misogyny) is 100% ALL ABOUT culture wars. That's the entire reason they exist.

@SunsetBeauregarde um.... you're a little behind. This news has come out BECAUSE the trans lobby have been agitating for it. Pink News themselves released articles saying they will soon be available for men. So before you accuse people of being 'anti trans', you might want to actually get your facts straight. Th is is being pushed by the trans lobby and their media outlets. They, were the first to break the news, before the DM. If it is "nonsense" you might want to tell the trans lobby that....

I had wondered whether this had been raised on the thread. I am sure I have read that there are greatly increased risks to the living donor above and beyond the average hysterectomy because it needs to remove considerably more connective tissue, including more of the vagina so as to be able to connect to the (female) recipient.

Yet this is where it is headed, implants in trans women. And the trans lobby are campaigning really hard for this. Really hard. For them, it has never been about women receiving a womb. It's about men receiving a womb. They couldn't give a stuff about actual women receiving it. They are rejoicing in it purely because it will be happening for men.

Oh, more things that "will not happen", am I right? Trans lobby say it WILL happen. Are you calling them liars?

I could say it the other way around. Scientists are wasting money on self-indulgent irrelevant garbage like this, than actually drive meaningful research into things that matter.

No, first mentioned by Pink News and Stonewall. They are the ones pushing it.

You really are out of the loop. I suggest you catch up, because the trans lobby have been pushing this, and were the first to break the news. What does that tell you?

You're in denial. Deeply in denial.

I had wondered whether this had been raised on the thread. I am sure I have read that there are greatly increased risks to the living donor above and beyond the average hysterectomy because it needs to remove considerably more connective tissue, including more of the vagina so as to be able to connect to the (female) recipient.

Exactly. They (as in the surgical team who performed this female transplant) say in their earlier paper that for an MTF uterus implant they need to take "as much donor vagina as possible".

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492192/figure/bjo15438-fig-0001/

Not that it ‘will be happening for men’ - this is important. To say it’s definitely going to happen is a massive leap from where the research is at currently.

Just because the trans lobby are dragging the debate in one direction doesn’t mean we have to follow them. We have a responsibility to talk about how this impacts women, and if we follow the trans lobby down the garden path we lose sight of the very real issues this advancement throws up for us as women.

We do not have to discuss women’s health issues as they relate to men if we choose not to. I choose not to.