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

I have words.

Thanks for this, I'll read it over coffee.

Janice Turner today

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/604951f0-4372-11ee-8b31-3c9c533abb75?shareToken=4ee5dff948a117f6c856a1f7f3031a5c

She has such a gift for distilling the issues into a tight word count. And for making it understandable to a general audience.

She really does. It's a superb article.

I'd forgotten Lavery wrote that sick comment a couple of years back. The fact he appeared on Woman's Hour is just sickening

It is a good article. We are now farming human beings, especially women.

Gave time for free or done on the NHS tab?

Thank you for the link. Brilliant article by Janice Turner yet again. She is so on the money all the time. Thank you Janice.

Another thank you for Janice, articulating how many women feel.

And so interesting that the operation is harsher than a hysterectomy.

That's something isn't it? A hysterectomy is one of the most major operations for women and not spoken of so positively, it's mostly performed as a life saving intervention.

So womb donating is even bigger than that. And no exploration of this by the media.

Surrogacy has been around since the bible for fucks sake and its still mostly women having babies for other women, like always.

And in the bible it is low status women forced to bear children for rich women, like always.

Prostitution, slavery, rape and child abuse have been around since the bible too. That doesn't make it ok.

Great article. And this

Womb transplantation gets to the heart of a central modern dilemma: does the right to have a biological child override every other moral consideration?

It really seems to me that it does.

On a thread in AIBU this week women explaining the exploitative nature of surrogacy were called zealots and lacking compassion by a poster who said they thought that surrogacy should be banned but only after the women in that country were lifted out of poverty and had other choices.

To clarify, not that the country should ban surrogacy at the same time as providing all the support mechanisms to lift women out of poverty or just ban surrogacy to prevent wealthy women around the world exploiting those women, but to allow some women to be exploited and put at risk until all women in that country had better options. There is a disconnect between political reality and dreams I think in some people’s minds.

Another good article

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/womb-transplants-uk-fill-me-with-foreboding

What an excellent article! Thank you so much KimberleyClark for posting that. Sonia Sodha is such a fantastic and insightful journalist for women’s issues. Thank goodness she’s at the Observer to bring these crucial issues to a bigger audience. If you ever read this: Thank you for speaking up for women Sonia, please keep going!

For those of you who labelled me and other posters tinfoil hat wearers, I've just heard from MIL that the talk of her village is that a women who recently went to Turkey for bariatric surgery, became unwell on return to the UK was admitted to hospital and it was discovered that she had had one of her kidney's removed. She has since died. This only happened in the last few weeks and the backlog for coroner's cases here is about 6-8 months, so will have to wait till the spring to find out what has gone on.

The number of doctors and other HCP that would have needed to be complicit in this for it to be possible is horrifying. She was only in her 30s and they murdered her.

Don't think this doesn't happen, don't think it can't happen to British people and don't think it won't be wombs being stolen one day.

Great and well researched article from Sonia.

This isn't new. This kind of thing happen nearly everyday. Some people are just oblivious to it.