Womb transplant update

It certainly seems risky in lots of ways. The women receiving the transplants must be desperate and that's saddening too.

Yes it is bags sad that people are so desperate to become mothers that they re willing to take so many risks with their health - operations, powerful drugs and maybe another operation to remove the implanted womb if they don't want to take anti rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

It's their choice.

The advancement in medical science is a tricky one, isn't it. Just because a thing can be done doesn't necessarily mean it has to be done. Also wonder about the long term effects the drug regime will have upon a child who is carried to full term in this way. Anti-rejection drugs will surely have an impact.

I confidently predict that the next step will be transplanting wombs into male to female transsexuals and delivery by CS.

Did anyone watch the programme on BBC4 the other night about early organ transplants and how dangerous/unsuccessful they were at first [along with being downright unethical sometimes]?It was as if the medical profession, at the time, had been given carte blanche to experiment with desperate people, but then that happened even in the early days of antibiotic use. Fascinating stuff. They almost stopped doing them until cyklosporin [sp] was discovered. Even one of the men who pioneered IVF had death threats made to him at first. Had my family not been affected several times by the distress caused by fertility problems I'd be totally opposed to these transplants; as it is I still don't understand how a process such as pregnancy that even starts off with a problem of rejection in a normal healthy person can be feasable when vast amounts of anti rejection drugs have to be used. Then there's the image of the man who had a hand transplant that went horrible wrong; how would one feel to have someone elses womb inside them; something that, unlike other organs is so 'personal' [for want of a better word]. What happens, by the way if someone is pregnant when they've had a kidney transplant which is probably the most common sort of operation done these days?

Here's what it says on an advice website for kidney diseases

"The amount of anti-rejection medicines is important. In the early period after a transplant, patients are on higher doses of these medicines. Once the medicines are reduced to maintenance levels, they do not seem to have negative effects on a developing baby. However, long-term side effects are still unknown."

I can see why the operation would be technically challenging - the uterus needs a fantastic blood supply (to keep a placenta and baby going), it also needs nerve supply if it is ever to contract for the purposes of giving birth.
I guess if it had been on offer in the mid 1950s, my father would have volunteered for an experimental heart transplant.

My friend knew someone who was one of the longest surviving heart transplant patients. I think people were very brave when the operations were first being performed. In the programme I watched there was a girl with cystic fibrosis whose brother and sister both donated a lung to; but she died three weeks after surgery . I found that incredibly sad. Her sister said she didn't want her sister to see how much pain she was in after she'd had her lung removed.