Baby born from dead donor womb transplant in UK first

[IwantToRetire]

Commisseration and support for the family of the woman who died, and happy for the new mother.

But feel sort of uneasy about this.

https://news.sky.com/story/simply-a-miracle-baby-boy-born-from-dead-donor-womb-transplant-in-uk-first-13511093

Wow, just wow to this thread.

I was diagnosed with kidney disease in my early 30s, went on dialysis in my mid 30s. Dialysis can keep you alive and relatively well for decades. However, id just got married and we desperately wanted children.

My best friend wanted to donate her kidney to me very specifically to enable me to have children (it isn’t recommended on dialysis).

I had my kidney transplant and two years later had DS1, followed 2 years later by DS2. Both born without complications, at full term and happy and healthy.

You can absolutely take immune suppressants throughout pregnancy with no harm to the baby.

Both boys aren’t aware they’re born into ‘medical chaos’ nor do they know they are ‘Frankenstein’ children. I’m wondering when I should tell them 🤔

They just know that their mummy needed help to have them and her good friend gave up part of her body to enable that to happen, and that’s why they have part of her name.

There are some weird takes on here

I’m really uncomfortable with this.
I currently have opted in to being an organ donor but I will have to research how to make sure it’s only the body parts I want donated.

If the baby survives (and I obviously hope it would) this or any other complications they may want another.
The drugs and their affect on the woman are lowest in the list of concerns here. A human is expected to grow inside this organ so it isn't the same as a kidney transplant.

I guess they'd feel sad about a miscarriage if that was the outcome - I'm not sure why they wouldn't run the risk of a miscarriage. Do you think they should feel differently about that risk than someone doing IVF?

Frankenstein baby? Hardly.

I can imagine it would be more upsetting to know that strangers who know very little about this, and nothing about their family, passing judgement on them?

Are you opposed to organ transplants in general?

Where do you draw the line?

As others have said, I think a lot more thought needs to be given to the children in this scenario. Effectively they have a whole family they have never met – a whole family history they may some day wish to know about. My husband’s father never knew his own father and, despite having been raised in a reasonably close-knit family, the mental health repercussions of that still live on with him at the age of 80 and have reverberated down the lives of the whole family - he was, for example, never able to form a proper relationship with his own sons. Some may argue that situation is not comparable but do we honestly know exactly how human attachment works?

I have read that there are some immunosuppressants that are apparently quite safe to use in pregnancy, and others that aren't. So I assume the woman would have to be on the safe ones or it wouldn't be an option.

Soooo my kidney donor now lives abroad and my children have only met her a handful of times. But all my blood went through her kidney while I was pregnant with each of them, my blood pressure was managed by her kidney while they were growing.

Are you saying they have some form of attachment to her which will negatively impact them in life as she is not part of their immediate family? Bizarre

More safe drugs than not. Of my regime there was only one drug that wasn’t pregnancy safe that was easily switched out. No harm to either of my children

In what sense do they have another family? Do children born to recipients of other organs have “another family”? As the article says: “A baby born following the transplantation of a womb from a deceased donor does not have any genetic links with the donor.” This baby grew and developed inside its own mother’s body.

I was mainly referring to surgical and physiological complications, which can often happen some time after surgery and not be immediately obvious.

I would imagine the wombs of post menopausal women or women like me who’ve had caesareans and have wombs full of scar tissue wouldn’t be suitable? So young women’s wombs are probably the ones that would be being transplanted for 30k a pop. I’d imagine like surrogacy it starts very medically and ethically and it quickly becomes a way of exploiting poor women in other countries who have little/ no choice. Happy to be proved wrong though if you could grow a healthy baby in the donated womb of a 80 year old who died peacefully surrounded by grandchildren.

Huh?

the baby was conceived using the parents’ egg and sperm. The womb has nothing to do with that.

So where do you draw the line?

corneas are fine, lungs aren’t?

the donor consented to organ donation. The recipient had it funded privately by a charity pursuing medical research. There are women in America who have had multiple children via womb transplant. When you’ve had two, they remove it via hysterectomy at the same time as the c section.

I am really struggling to see why anyone would be against this?

Not particularly, as far as I know. That wasn’t the point I was making.

I'm glad there are safe drugs. There are other complications with surgery of this magnitude and while kidney transplant is a major operation, you arent trying to grow a human inside it

Okay but it’s been done multiple times safely? I would assume the doctors who are carrying out these procedures know a lot more about it than you do.

If all parties consent and are healthy, why do you care?

I was responding to you saying how would they feel (and could they forgive themselves) if something went wrong and the baby died. This is sadly pretty common in all pregnancy - do you think they should feel worse/ differently to people who miscarry after IVF?

Organ donation always makes me feel queasy but this is amazing and if you’ve agreed to donate your womb at death how wonderful it is to now be part of a new life. I wouldn’t be describing any child as a Frankenstein project either that comment was too bad.

As this is a sex and gender discussion thread, is anyone going to broach the possibility of this transplant being performed on someone not born female? Well I've broached it now, so someone has.

Am I right to be concerned about these 15,000 women of reproductive age as per this quote from the newspaper article today? I do hope that the Professor is talking about biological women.

Prof Smith, who was at the birth, said the development of the programme depends on funding.
“Both the living and deceased programmes have got capacity for expansion,” he said. “We’re constrained mainly by cash.”
“Probably, we know 5,000 women in the UK are born with no womb, but we also know there’s probably about 15,000 women of reproductive age who would potentially like to have a womb,” he added.

This is a very, very long way off it at all possible. Outcomes for very premature babies are still quite poor. We simply can’t replicate the conditions inside a live human body.

It’s just the same as someone donating their heart, liver, eyes, etc.

This is exactly the kind of thing that medical science should be doing. Look at the joy it’s brought already.

As far as I can tell it hasn’t been attempted yet. The charities have only been given legally binding permission to do it on women, and they have stated they cannot and will not be taking part in this type of procedure for the “foreseeable future”

https://wombtransplantuk.org/fact-sheet/the-potential-for-operations-for-transgender-women

Some of the recipients of donated wombs will have been born without a functioning womb and others will have lost their womb as a result of serious medical conditions including endometriosis and cancer.
These two approved series of operations, which follow over 25 years of ethically approved and exhaustive clinical research, must be completed and then carefully evaluated, and peer reviewed, strictly in line with the provisions of our permissions.
The UK Womb Transplant Research Team is fully aware and respectful of the 2010 Gender Equality Act that mandates equal care for transgender women, assuming technical feasibility. However it is abundantly clear from all recent experience and research that technical feasibility for a safe and successful operation for a transgender female, together with the possibility of sustaining a successful pregnancy, does not currently exist and that many years of detailed medical research will be required before this might become a viable and safe option.

I agree that somehow it feels different to a kidney or a heart, which are just pumps and filters. They feel less emotive? Whereas the thing you literally build your baby in feels...more personal, in a weird way, almost like donating your face.

Personally I don't have an issue with dead donor uterus transplants if (and only if!) the dead woman explicitly consented to donate that particular organ. But I would never want to donate my own uterus, and I have concerns around live donation given it's an organ only women have. Seeing the way other reproductive donations by women are monetised worldwide, and how women are pressured into them, the ethics worry me.