Philobiblon

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.)