> The first baby born as a result of a womb transplant was in Sweden in 2014. Since then around 135 such transplants have been carried out in more than a dozen countries, including the US, China, France, Germany, India and Turkey. Around 65 babies have been born.
"Grace was born with a rare condition, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, where the womb is missing or underdeveloped, but with functioning ovaries"
A rare, congenital, condition.
I stopped and looked at the natal photo for a while. It is a feeling I have not had before. This new life, chanced not only by lineage but multiple family members and a host of research and medical staff.
The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
Just for clarity, "in UK" is qualifying the whole thing, not that she just happened to be in the UK. A woman in Alabama had a child via a uterus transplant, among other places.
This is really cool but it's ultimately a stop-gap measure.
Where we want to end up is with artificial wombs because that will ultimately give individuals much more control over their reproduction and will do away with the onerous physiological and psychological stresses that pregnancy puts on women.
If everything scientific inquiry accomplishes is a “miracle”, then nothing is.
Is it a miracle I can go to JFK and fly through the air and be in Europe for dinner?
It’s a surgical procedure. It’s cool that it worked. We don’t need to invoke the supernatural here, especially given the oodles of hard work that went into this by very real and natural human beings.
Pretty amazing. I suppose that the effects of immunosuppressants on pregnancy and the unborn child are already well understood.
> He told the BBC around 10 women have embryos in storage or are undergoing fertility treatment, a requirement for being considered for womb transplantation. Each transplant costs around £30,000, he says, and the charity has sufficient funds to do two more.
Is this because they're not connecting the transplanted uterus to the fallopian tubes or something? Or is there some other reason that it wouldn't be possible to conceive the "old-fashioned way" post-transplant?
Creating and freezing embryos otherwise seems like a very strange thing for a woman to have done who has no uterus, unless she was already considering surrogacy. Where was she expecting them to grow?
Requiring the embryos to be created before knowing whether the womb transplant would be possible or successful seems really odd to me.
This is great news, but I wonder how that ever got approved given the safety implications for mother and child.
Note this is currently not possible without the use of In vitro fertilization
MRKH is inherited, which adds an additional ethnical layer to this.
Lab-grown vaginas made from the patient's own stem-cells have also been transplanted into women [1]. Hopefully soon it will be possible to get the whole #!/usr/bash.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaginal_transplantation#Labora...
(I don't know why this lab stopped performing this procedure though.)
I can't help but wonder if there is any hope of this working for trans persons in the future?
Could someone born as a man have a transplanted womb and get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, in theory? anyone here with more medical knowledge who can comment on how likely that is to work at some point in the future?
Whose baby is it? If I get a transplanted womb and have hundreds of kids are they mine of the original owners? I would assume the current owner, but Anglo laws tend to be completely backwards when it relates to sex.
It would be quite interesting to see how public discourse about gender is affected by this, and in particular if this procedure is done successfully on a transgender woman. Regardless of your political outlook, it will no longer be possible to say that the ability to give birth is a condition for being a woman. (And what will happen should chromosome replacement become possible? It seems unlikely that anyone would really invest in such a procedure, but is it medically feasible?)
From an individual perspective this is absolutely crazy and should never be done. But from a broader perspective it's clearly very beneficial for the advancement of science to have such fearless pioneers. Amazing stuff!
This is incredible technology. But I am crying in American at "Each transplant costs around £30,000, he says."
I'm not religious, but publishing this the day before Easter is disgusting.
It’s incredible and Inwish long life and happiness to the newborn and her family
I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now”
Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.
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So if they do a DNA test, her sister is the actual biological mother I guess.
Glad for this family, but also:
This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
Keywords: fetal microchimerism, placental barrier, trophoblast invasion