Procedure could be offered more widely including to transgender people
The UK’s first womb transplant has been hailed as the “dawn of a new era” in fertility treatment.
Surgeons in Oxford spent eight hours removing the womb from the 40-year-old donor, then nine hours implanting it into her 34-year-old sister, who was in the operating theatre next door.
The chair of the British Fertility Society, Dr Raj Mathur, said the “remarkable achievement” is “the dawn of a new age” and “a new era in treating these patients”, noted Sky News.
What did the papers say?
The donor and recipient are said to be “over the moon” after recovering well from the procedure. The recipient plans to have IVF this autumn using embryos that she and her husband have in storage.
Prof Richard Smith, gynaecological surgeon, who led the organ retrieval team, told the BBC it was a “massive success”, adding that “the whole thing was emotional” and “we were all a bit tearful afterwards”.
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The first birth following a womb transplant took place in Sweden in 2014, reported The Telegraph, when a boy called Vincent was born after his 36-year-old mother had a womb transplanted from a family friend.
Since then, more than 90 womb transplants have been carried out internationally, including in the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Czech Republic, Brazil, Germany, Serbia and India. Most involved a “living donor”, said The Guardian, with “about 50 babies” born as a result.
UK surgeons were given permission to carry out the operation in 2015, but “institutional delays” and three years of disruption caused by the Covid pandemic meant a “much longer wait”, said the i news site.
Now that the first procedure has been successfully completed here, attention is turning to what this means for the future of fertility. The development will “change the fertility landscape here”, said the i news site. “You’ve got girls, maybe 14, who have not had periods, they go to the GP and a scan shows there is no uterus”, Prof Smith told the outlet.
This is an “absolute catastrophe” he added, and “up until now there’s been no solution for that, other than adoption or surrogacy.” However, “that’s not the case now”, he said, and “it’s really exciting.”
What next?
For now, the plan is to focus on “living donations” from a relative, with up to 30 transplants taking place a year, said Sky News, but there is potential for larger numbers, because many women have “come forward to offer their wombs”.
Isabel Quiroga, consultant at the Oxford Transplant Centre, and one of the surgeons, said young women have come forward to say: “I don’t want to have children, but I would love to help others have a child” or “I’ve already had my children; I would love other women to have that experience.”
A second UK womb transplant is due this autumn, with more patients in the preparation stages. Surgeons have approval for 10 operations involving brain-dead donors plus five using a living donor.
However, Womb Transplant UK currently has enough funds for only four of these operations and womb transplants on the NHS will not be available for “a long while”, said the i news site. For a permanent womb transplant programme to be funded on the health service, an evaluation would need to be carried out on operations to see if they have been successful.
Meanwhile, surgeons in the US said they believe it is “medically possible” to perform the procedure on trans women who were assigned male at birth but have had sex change surgery, reported the Daily Mail.
However, Prof Smith said transgender womb transplants are “many years off” because “there are an awful lot of steps” to go through. He said the pelvic anatomy, vascular anatomy and shape of the pelvis are different, and there are other issues to overcome, noted Yahoo News. “My suspicion is a minimum of 10 to 20 years,” he added.
While some would welcome such a development, it would be controversial. “Many would argue this Frankenstein procedure is not being performed in the interests of medical care,” wrote Alexandra Marshall in The Spectator Australia earlier this year, describing it as “stitching wombs into men in an attempt to create new types of humans that defy the natural order”.
However, Nicola Williams, who has been studying the ethical implications of human reproduction for several years at the University of Lancaster in the UK, told EuroNews that “there are definitely equality-based reasons for considering uterus transplants in transgender women.”
