Baby born after womb transplant

[Wildflowers99]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/34329085/womb-transplant-baby-hope/

I’m not really sure how I feel about this.

On one hand it all seems consensual and fine, and nice that they’re all happy.

On the other it seems yet more expansion of surrogacy-type science, making pregnancy/babies a sort of human right that we should go to any lengths to make possible for people. And all the ethical/moral issues around that.

What do you think?

Is haemorrhoid removal necessary? Are prosthetic limbs necessary? Are antidepressants absolutely necessary in every case?

I would argue that the vast majority of medical care in not necessary in the strictest sense. But people only care about this when it’s something that exclusively benefits women

Well what they want is irrelevant because it cannot be done!

its still not going to happen

you need wayyyyyyyy more than a womb to carry and birth

Too right!

YANBU. I’m very worried about it and don’t see it as progress at all.

Young women are already preyed on via ads placed by fertility clinics to “donate” their eggs (at huge risk to their health. And now this? In every family who has a woman without a womb there’ll be the expectation that the sister endures this so her womb less sibling can play happy families.

I’m sick of egotistical doctors pushing these boundaries without ever stopping to think what these dystopian steps will mean for all women within a few decades.

Our reproductive parts aren’t tradeable commodities. This situation is getting out of hand.

Surrogacy Concern have expressed reservations about it tonight and Sonia Sodha and others in the past have too.

They can want all they want, it's not physically possible

It depends on the situation of the donor as to whether a woman has been exploited for her uterus or not. If it is transplanted to another female it is significantly different between that and being implanted into a male. It is not a transplant at all in a male person but an implant.

And as someone already said, it is not a plug and play device in a human. It works in a female person because they do have at least the other body parts and connectivity to progress a pregnancy, so you would expect.

No male person has any body process designed to control and grow an embryo into a foetus. In a male person the uterus becomes comparatively a bag that doctors then will attempt to grow a human in. None of the body’s systems have the coding to do this naturally. It will all have to be using exogenous chemicals and so on. It may as well be a human growing in a bag.

There really is significant differences between a female to female transplant where the coding is expected to work as it should with support versus transplant into a male body which has no coding or connectivity.

And then the ethics have to be addressed. What right does any human have to demand another human is grown for them in what amounts to an artificial bag? And where does the rights of that created human stand ethically?

They cannot keep the womb after the baby has been born. It needs to be removed. So there would be no point in a man having one when they can’t have a baby.

So you don't believe in corneal transplant to restore sight? Cosmetic skin grafting after disfiguring injury? Bone and tendon transplant to restore function in a limb? Renal transplant to relieve somebody from the burden of dialysis? Heart valve replacement to improve the symptoms of heart failure?

the baby is staying with its mother, rather than being deliberately ripped away at birth without ever having the ability to consent to something so life altering.

Very happy for the family involved, a beautiful baby and a wonderful outcome for them. The picture of them with their baby daughter is pure joy.

But I feel iffy about rich people basically buying babies via surrogacy, particularly from women in developing countries who are so much more vulnerable. The idea of womb transplants is a further step I don’t think the human race as whole deserves- just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

I also note that the baby sounds like she was low birth weight. I suspect this is pretty high risk for the infant.

Yes. They have. Some transgender influencers with platformed voices have stated that they look forward to getting pregnant so they can be the first to get abortions too. Other public male people with transgender identities have also stated they look forward to the days when male people could have abortions.

These sentiments are obviously very concerning.

This is a wonderful thing, congratulations to them all.

Until recently I believe uterus transplants had only successfully been done using dead donors, because of the need to use the cervix and potentially part of the vagina as well.

Not all women with MRKH are completely missing a uterus; some of them have an incomplete uterus. Perhaps that was the case for this woman, making her a good candidate to receive a uterus from a living donor.

It's difficult and rare enough to perform a successful uterus transplant on a female recipient, and the number of women with MRKH who would like to receive a donated uterus is likely much longer than the number of uteruses available. I really can't see transplants on male recipients being attempted. Their bodies would almost certainly reject the donated uterus, and it would be a complete waste of a viable organ.

I wouldn’t let mad shit spouted by a handful of unhinged twitter users colour your view of a development that’s an incredible source of hope for women with certain very specific medical conditions.

If you’re not a woman with one of those medical conditions this news will not affect you or the unhinged twitter folk a jot, whatever they may say.

So why not just be happy for the women it may affect? And be happy you’re not one of them too, because they are dealing with a lot.

They are just idiots who don’t understand how the female body or bodies in general work.
The womb needs to be removed after the pregnancy.
If they were to be able to get pregnant with a transplanted womb, they couldn’t just have an abortion, the whole womb would have to come back out.
There will likely never be the technology to achieve a successful pregnancy in a transplanted womb in a male. It is too complicated and would involve massive amounts of artificial hormones. It is seriously unlikely to ever be physically possible even besides all the ethical issues.

This makes me feel slightly uncomfortable on an ethical & genetic level. Yes, it's medically amazing, but where do we stop? Ovaries anyone?

Actually, in most instances it is an older (even postmenopausal) woman in the recipients family, eg her mother or aunt who is the donor. There is no need for the womb to be taken from a woman who is herself in her fertile years.

An older woman beyond her reproductive years, donating an organ which is relatively redundant to her, so that her own immediate family can expand to her probable benefit and delight, does not strike me as particularly ethically concerning at all. This is altruistic donation to restore normal reproductive function. Regulated in the same way as all other human organ/tissue donation. Far more similar to altruistic kidney donation than it is to surrogacy or even egg donation.

Even if they did get a womb transplanted, there might be a slight problem with the plumbing arrangements for getting a fertilised egg into it.

This isn’t all that new tbh, around 100 womb transplants have been completed with about 50 babies being born. I think this form of organ transplantation was first tested in Sweden in 2013 with the first baby born from a dead woman’s womb in Brazil in 2018.

“The first baby born after a live donor womb transplant was in Sweden in 2013. Scientists have so far reported a total of 39 procedures of this kind, resulting in 11 live births.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/science/worlds-first-baby-born-via-womb-transplant-from-dead-donor-idUSKBN1O32WR/

What you might not see in the articles celebrating this are details of the drug regimen applied to stop a woman’s body from rejecting the organ, or the fact that most have to be removed fairly soon afterwards before it poses a threat to the woman’s life.

So women who have babies this way could be facing life saving hysterectomies of the wombs that came from other women, at a time when they have a newborn to care for.

Anyone here remember the threads from around 202 about organ donation when the UK government had a consultation on “rare and novel” organ transplants?

Stop, you’re being too rational for this thread!

I am in full agreeance with you there.

This essentially summarises my concern, which is primarily for the donor. And those concerns will be the same regardless of who she is donating to.

I wondered that too - she seemed very small for a term baby.

I would happily donate my womb to someone who didn’t have one. I don’t need it any more. I’d actually like it gone, because it’s just another organ that can develop cancer!
I would also donate a kidney or a part of my liver to a family member if they needed it.