The "womb transplant breakthrough"

[hackmum]

Well done, Guardian, on getting a man to write about what womb transplants mean for women:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/06/live-birth-dead-donor-definition-motherhood-transplants-pregnancy

You can't make it up can you.

And if the article is already being written and discussed by men how long until the whole thing is taken over by men.

We all know where this is going and it's not ethical

Any male-bodied person reading this who might want to experience the sensations of childbirth, call me, I can arrange for you to shit a bowling ball ...

I thought only someone totally clueless could write a sentence like:

"By making pregnancy potentially available to trans women and even to cis men (with hormone treatments), uterus transplants could challenge social norms and preconceptions, just as IVF has done by creating new family structures."

So I looked him up. It turns out he has an impressive CV, including 20 years at Nature, a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a PhD in physics from Bristol. No biology, obviously, but even so I'd have thought someone with that amount of experience in writing about science would understand that the likelihood of scientists being able to transplant a uterus into a man, and a man then being able to use it to gestate a baby, is small to the point of impossible. It's quite depressing, really.

A 'science writer' who is apparently unaware of the skeletal differences between men and women that make it exceedingly unlikely that someone born male could ever carry a child.

I stopped reading when I came to the words 'all sexes'. It should be 'both'.

Since when has giving birth to a child been in order to challenge social norms? The child never appears anywhere in this narrative, nor does the desire to parent, or to have a family, or how responsible it is to make extreme medical experimentation on your body the precursor for becoming a parent and how the child might be affected, it's just a wanted experience. Cos unfair.

We're talking about children. Human beings. The central issue is what is in their best interests, not the right of a male to have a foetus tortured as a prop in their self expression. I want a fucking sign board, painted with large letters stating EVERYTHING IS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU.

I saw this article this morning and thought of you lot I don't know what to say except what a pile of utter horseshit from start to finish

My thoughts exactly Knicknack

And you know what else?

Transplant is correct as it is medical tissue even though as I am shouting IT IS A FKING IMPLANT YOU NUMBNUT so that battle is lost already. Fuming.

Transwomen and even c** men?

As though there’s some kind of vast biological difference.

Where is the child in all of this? Where is their safety? The Uk has thankfully very sensible laws on what you can and cannot do with embryos. And you cannot implant one into a man.

Babies are not validation devices for paraphilias.

As though there’s some kind of vast biological difference.

I thought that, and then thought, maybe his meaning is not that there's a biological difference between the two, but that even "cis men" as well as trans women might want to go through pregnancy.

All bollocks, of course.

"By making pregnancy potentially available to trans women and even to cis men (with hormone treatments), uterus transplants could challenge social norms and preconceptions, just as IVF has done by creating new family structures."

I'm just impressed that he thinks that this as yet non existent technology will change social norms. I wasn't even aware that IVF had challenged social norms.

In 2011 it was estimated that 80% of the world lived on less that ten dollars a day - should Bill and Melinda Gates cancel their family planning initiatives in Sub Saharan Africa given that apparently science has moved on and men are going to be having babies?

Or perhaps is he just looking at this from the perspective of the very small number of people in the world who could even begin to think about paying for this kind of operation, if it existed.

I wouldn’t underestimate just how clueless many men are about pregnancy and birth, no matter what degrees they’ve got. Sadly.

Well, maybe transwomen and c** men will need to give birth as we seem to be sterilising all the chirldren ffs

How has IVF created new family structures?

Does he mean that single women or lesbian couples can now have babies? .. but they always did. If this is all he means then it's just a more preferable way of doing what women have been doing for a long time

What's going to happen to this implanted uterus when it's not being used for a pregnancy? How is the body going to react? Surely the recipient will have to be on immunosuppresant drugs for life. Being on these drugs makes pregnancy more risky, so all pregnancies using an implanted uterus would be considered high-risk and need extra care and intervention. What happens if the uterus is rejected during a pregnancy?

I'm sure all these questions have been thoroughly considered...

howlsmovingcastle84 normal procedure, I believe, is to wait a few months after the transplant procedure when I guess risk of rejection is lessened. After the baby is removed the womb is removed as well and immunosuppressants can be ceased.

I'm not sure how it would work in a man. Do they have the right ligaments and blood vessels to support a pregnancy?

And these uterus’ are all coming from... where exactly?!?

Just usual organ donors PreseaCombatir now a dead donor has been shown to be effective (previously only live donations have been done). Trans men have been posited as a possible source of live donors, grotesque as that sounds.

www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/60873-men-pregnant-uterus-transplant.html

This article suggests it is probably a long way off before this procedure would be attempted in a man.

And these uterus’ are all coming from... where exactly?!?

Sadly I think there are desperate people who would be prepared to sell a womb - after all people sell kidneys.

However I still think there is a limit to the number of people who would be able to pay for the surgery and treatment.

LM should start the pregnancy fund now probably...

Research that has looked at the sex of organ donors and organ recipients has shown that when men receive organs from women the chances of rejection are higher (this is not seen when women receive organs from male donors) . This is another factor that would have to be considered as a uterus would always have to come from a women.

howlsmovingcastle84 that's interesting - I wonder why it's not the other way around.

I read somewhere that of all the uterus transplants that have produced a pregnancy so far they were in a woman with a vagina. The women who had vaginas constructed out of bowel or other tissue weren't able to sustain a pregnancy. Of course with a dead donor you could transplant the vagina too but who knows what other biological factors are important for sustaining pregnancy.

kincat
It's still developing science but it seems those pesky chromosomes are involved again-with the X chromosome carrying more immunological functions than the Y chromosome.
There would be so many factors to consider if a male was to attempt to sustain a pregnancy. The reason a woman's body does not reject a developing baby as a foreign object is due to the genes that would normally cause the immune response being 'turned off' at the site of implantation. This process would also have to occur in men if they are to carry a baby to full-term.

Meanwhile 2.4 billion people don’t have access to toilets that adequately separate waste, yet apparently the possibility of womb transplants is going to change what it means to be a woman.

So much of the narrative around hormones and surgery assumes a ‘western’ standard of healthcare, that isn’t even universally available in the west.

Can’t help thinking it would make little difference to the majority of humans with the kind of body that produces eggs.