Lifestyle ops must not burden NHS
SURGEONS at Churchill Hospital in Oxford carried out the UK’S first womb transplant, a 17-hour procedure in which a 34-yearold born without a uterus received her older sister’s. The sister is 40 and already has two children. The operation took place a few months ago and the woman is hoping to implant fertilised embryos at the end of the year.
Amazing. And the cost? £25,000 which was paid for by donations to the Womb Transplant UK charity.
After the woman has delivered two babies, the recycled womb (rather knackered by now one imagines) will be removed so that she can stop taking the immunosuppressant drugs which prevent her body rejecting the organ.
Wow. That’s an awful lot of major surgical interventions needed to give one woman the chance to carry a baby. What the breathlessly triumphant and saccharine (“a sister’s gift”) coverage of this nodoubt wizard surgery didn’t mention was that unlike, say, a heart transplant, this was essentially a lifestyle operation, not a life-saving one.
There are other ways for women who cannot bear children to become mothers.
This patient’s frozen embryos may not even take so she could be setting herself up for a world of emotional and physical pain which could have been avoided if she had chosen some less hi-tech route to motherhood. Still, it’s an entirely personal choice as long – and this is the nub – as you and I don’t have to pay for it.
One in 5,000 women is born without a viable womb. Under the charity’s rules a potential candidate for a transplant would be expected to provide her own eggs and the operation will only take place when there are embryos ready to be transferred to the new uterus. Its website says it will only consider patients who are “women” diagnosed with what is known as Absolute Uterine/womb Factor Infertility.
I take that to mean that trans women may not apply – but as soon as the news of this operation was released the inevitable transgender question surfaced.
Mats Brännström is a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology and chief physician at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who helped deliver the first baby born as a result of a uterine transplant.
He has been inundated with queries about wombs for transgender women (like a mechanic being sourced for spare parts) and says it should be possible in ten years and he “can’t see any ethical boundaries”.
But I can. It is inevitable that some man will argue that it is a violation of his human rights if he is not provided with a working uterus asap, paid for by the NHS, so that he can become a mother.
And the chances are that – while people with cancer see their treatment put on hold and waiting times increase – this man will get his womb.
‘Chances are this man will get his womb’