How can a uterus transplant be justified?
There’s been angst in Britain recently about the problem of regulating IVF – how do you balance patients’ frequent desperation to have a child, the health risks they may be running for themselves and, even more morally problematic, for the possible child-to-be, and the frequently exceedingly high costs to society.
Now it is going further – doctors in the US are contemplating a womb transplant.
Now kidney transplants, liver transplants, even, perhaps, heart transplants; they are all morally unproblematic so far as I’m concerned. Without them, the patients are highly likely to die. They choose for understandable reasons to take the significant medical risks (the operation, the continuing immune-suppression drugs etc) in the hope of many years of relatively healthy life.
But what of a woman who is entirely healthy but happens not to have a functional uterus for one reason or another? Should she be allowed to subject herself to two major operations (the implanting of the donor organ, and its later planned removal), the potential, largely unknown risks to any foetus being developed in that womb, and the huge cost – all so she can bear a child herself, when she has many other opportunities – adoption, even surrogacy?
I think not. And perhaps that final argument is the strongest. How many lives of women could that cash save?
On Radio Four’s PM tonight, there was an item about the first anniversary of the inauguration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Africa’s first female head of state. It focused on her campaign against rape, and its notable lack of success.
At the account’s centre was the story of an 11-year-old who died many months after a rape in which she had probably suffered an abdominal fistula due to its violence. (An outcome of rape on which I had written elsewhere.)
How much cash would have paid for treatment to save her life: £100 would probably have done it. You’d get a lot of such treatments for the cost of one uterus transplant…
(A report on the problem of rape in Liberia. (Some may find this account traumatic.)
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While I have some sympathy for this argument – why rail particularly against womb transplants? At least there there is potential for a new life. If you want to rail against unnecessary medical treatments, surely plastic surgery is way ahead on the list.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to have children easily, but I can certainly understand the desire to be genetically related to your own children.
I think that IVF and reporductive medicine gets too much of a bad rap in the “the west spends too much on medicine when the third world suffers for a tiny bit of help” arguments.
Comment by Jennifer — January 17, 2007 @ 10:03 am
Because there is no actual health benefit to anyone in it – unlike say heart transplants etc – which does complicate the third world argument.
These betray the basic principle of medicine of “first do no harm”.
Comment by Natalie Bennett — January 17, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less simply to exp erience pregnancy. Two major surgeries in a very delicate part of the body, and as you say, goodness knows what the risks are to mother and child… Surrogacy allows wo men to have children with their own DNA. As for any possible emotional problems caused by not experiencing pregnancy, if someone can afford the operation they can afford to pay for someone else’s medical treatment. Saving a life would be a consolation.
Comment by Claire — January 17, 2007 @ 3:25 pm
Does the womb, necessarily, have to be transplanted into another woman?
Comment by weggis — January 17, 2007 @ 8:10 pm
I can’t imagine how I could get to the state of mind where I’d prioritize some health concerns over others. It’s a perversity of our system that we fall into this trap so easily: kidneys are grave and important but uterii are what? Frivolous?
For me, being pro-choice means supporting all womens’ reproductive freedom, even the ones who make choices I would not make myself and even the ones I do not understand, whether it means taking extraordinary measures not to have children or whether it means taking extraordinary measure to have children. It’s not my (or anyone’s) place to get into womens’ psyches.
Comment by Kuri — January 18, 2007 @ 4:50 am
Pregnancy, By Any Means Necessary…
The possibility of future uterus transplants (discussed earlier) has raised a number of ethical questions, but also a good deal of interest, according to The New York Times. The telephone calls and e-mail messages started streaming in just hours after….
Trackback by Our Bodies Our Blog — January 31, 2007 @ 7:45 pm