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It would seem that a plot element from TG fiction has become a reality.
Doctors carry out first successful womb transplant
Precision Surgery
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Comments
I'm happy for the women
I don't think it will help T folks though unless they are quite wealthy and get one through illicit means. What struck me is "In Britain alone, there are at least 15,000 young women who were born without a womb or have had it removed due to cancer or another illness. Mrs Sert, 22, said: 'People ask me now if I want a boy or a girl, but it doesn't make any difference to me, I just want a child a healthy baby.'" That to me would indicate that the number of women world-wide who would be in need would preclude T-Girls from it. I would think that they'd have to develop an artificial one or stem-cell grown one to be all inclusive.
Is there an area large enough to implant one? Would they have to clear out space and risk moving internal organs around?
{{Hugs}}
Um.
You're probably not even aware of how loaded your response is from the perspective of a "T-Girl" so I won't hold it against you, but for the sake of education, we "T-Girls" are in fact women, and view it as a cis-privileged, heteronormative point of view to consider us less valid than other women and therefore less deserving of a medical treatment like this. I am a woman born without a womb, and have wished desperately to be able to bear children since I first learned I wouldn't be able to; why am I not as deserving as any other in that situation?
Now, I'm a bit older than many candidates and already have three lovely children I didn't have the opportunity to carry inside me, so I'd be happy to get in line and wait my turn on that basis, with the expectation that my turn might well never come. But that's the same position any woman my age with children by other means would find herself in.
Putting that aside, I imagine the number of organ donors with suitable wombs who die each year in auto accidents or what have you would be more than enough to fulfill the ongoing demand for transplants, if there were enough qualified surgeons to carry them out. Rejection would be the main other issue, and would probably preclude doing it for any purpose other than becoming immediately pregnant; pregnancy already has to pull the wool over the eyes of your immune system to keep it from rejecting the baby, so it may well prevent rejecting the foreign womb until it's served its purpose, or at least reduce the needed dosage of immunosuppressive anti-rejection drugs.
And yes, the womb in its non-pregnant state is fairly small and would not take up much room (eating a large meal would take up more). It grows to a relatively enormous size during pregnancy, of course, and the body can accommodate that, though not without discomfort and problems, especially toward the end of term. But I don't think that would be an important consideration relative to everything else involved.
Rejection
It's an interesting development, but don't start holding your breath yet. There are still numerous possible complications including rejection.
Maybe when cloning and genetic engineering have both advanced to the level of being able to custom-grow body parts with slightly different genetic combinations (e.g. replacing that pesky 'Y' chromosome with an 'X') but still present as 'native' to the host body...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Just a piece of useless medical trivia for you...
During early embryonic development (before the embryo sexually differentiates at about week seven... after which it is no longer called an embryo, but rather a foetus), both genetically male and genetically female human embryos contain all the "precursor plumbing" needed to become either a fully sexually functional male, or female. Which way the proto-genitalia differentiates is not directly controlled by the genetics of those organs... but rather, indirectly controlled by other parts of the body using the body's natural chemical messenger system (hormones).
Or in other words... if "cloning" reaches the ability "to custom-grow body parts"... there will be no need to also achieve a genetic engineering breakthrough. Simply controlling the hormone mix of the container in which the cloned body parts grow will result in fully functional "female" organs (well... technically "intersexed"... but visibly and functionally female, even if genetically male) -- which would be a genetic match for existing body tissues, and hence (hopefully!) not be subject to rejection issues. [If you tinkered with the cloned parts to change just them to "XX" rather than "XY"... without also tinkering with the rest of the body... the new organs would not be an exact genetic match to the rest of the body, and in theory would therefore have a greater rejection risk...]
Shrug. Of course, ovaries grown from "XY" genetic material would probably produce some rather odd eggs -- half of them containing an "X" chromosome (normal), and half containing a "Y" chromosome (decidedly abnormal). Assuming for the sake of argument that the "Y" eggs were viable and did not simply die immediately, if fertilized that would present an additional medical issue. Normally, where each fertilized egg has one of two possible (genetically different) "X" chromosomes from the female, and either an "X" or a "Y" from the male, there are two combinations of chromosomes that result in a "XX" offspring, and two "XY" permutations. Or in other words, there is a fifty-fifty chance of getting a boy or a girl. [Well... actually the numbers are slightly skewed in reality, due to "sex linked" medical conditions that can cause a certain number of offspring to spontaneously abort -- which makes the "observed birth" ratio not quite fifty-fifty. But let's not complicate this unnecessarily... for the sake of argument, let's just call it fifty-fifty.]
But an "XY" mother might produce an egg with an "X"... or an egg with a "Y" in it. Combined with the "X" or "Y" from the father, that gives a one chance in four of a "XX", two chances at "XY", and one chance in four of a "YY" embryo. Shrug. I strongly suspect that the "YY" offspring would be "non-viable"... which is the medically polite way of saying, "the baby dies before birth". So... assuming I am correct about that... hypothetically speaking, birth by a "XY" mother *is* possible, but it would have skewed percentages. If a baby is born at all, there would be one chance in three of a viable female child, and two chances in three of a viable male child. [Plus, sadly, there would actually be a higher than "normal" incidence rate of a one chance in four, non-viable spontaneous abortion... although one could hope that it would happen silently, without the parents being aware that it even occurred. Sigh. "Hopefully" being the key word there...].
By the way... although cloning an entire body is still quite some ways in the future (if it ever happens, due to bans on such research on humans)... and genetic engineering replacing a chromosome would likely face similar legal hurtles... research on growing organs outside the body is progressing nicely -- with some success already, at least on simpler organ structures. Which is to say... a story about growing an "XY" female reproductive tract outside the body, then implanting it, might be still, technically, "science fiction"... but as someone in the medical profession, I would not have to "suspend my disbelief" if someone wrote a story like that and put it in the very near future. How near? Shrug. Months? Years? Decades, at most? Roll the dice... research relies on inspiration, and does not really tend to follow timetables really well...
Just my two cents worth. Grin. From someone who has "old style" breast implants overdue for replacement... but is holding off, hoping that the technology for "autologous adipose-derived stem cells" (a fancy and fairly new form of using fat and stem cells from elsewhere on your body to augment breasts, currently in clinical trials last I heard) becomes "mainstream" soon enough that I can have my implants replaced with my own tissue, when the time comes. [That is to say... sometime in the next couple years]. More useless trivia... but relevant, I think, to the subject of "rejection free", "natural" tissue modifications of the human body...
Still...
Regardless of the caveats, it's still an astonishing development.
The science of transplants, and this operating in particular, can develop in ways that we don't anticipate, and none of us know the timetable.