From the article (not all contiguous but related):
> A new frontier, uterus transplants are seen as a source of hope for women who cannot give birth because they were born without a uterus or had to have it removed because of cancer, other illness or complications from childbirth. Researchers estimate that in the United States, 50,000 women might be candidates.
> The transplants are meant to be temporary, left in place just long enough for a woman to have one or two children, and then removed so she can stop taking the immune-suppressing drugs needed to prevent organ rejection.
> The transplants are now experimental, with much of the cost covered by research funds. But they are expensive, and if they become part of medical practice, will probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is not clear that insurers will pay, and Dr. Testa acknowledged that many women who want the surgery will not be able to afford it.
While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother? I've heard the price of a surrogate is $30-50K.
While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother? I've heard the price of a surrogate is $30-50K.
That sounds rhetorical, but I'll bite anyway.
Some women really long for the experience of childbirth. This may not be entirely psychological. Giving birth has significant impact on a woman's physiology. In addition to changing the shape of the hips and often other details like that, it leaves a woman a chimera for many years. Because her blood and the blood of the baby mix, she carries cells from the baby for many years afterwards.
I have a genetic disorder. I have two biological sons. I was not diagnosed until they were about 12 and 14 years old, so I didn't (consciously) know about my condition at the time that I was making reproductive choices (though I did know I was always "sickly").
My first pregnancy significantly impacted how I eat. I removed a number of things from my diet to cope with my difficult pregnancy and many were never added back into my diet. I have reason to believe this did my health a lot of good. For example, it cured the chronic, sever vaginal yeast infections I had for more than two years prior that pregnancy. I never again had chronic, severe yeast infections.
I have read up a bit on pregnancy-induced chimerism and talked a bit with people online about it and talked a fair amount with my sons. I have come to think that some women long for a baby because it can have a profound impact on a woman's body in ways we don't fully understand and perhaps sometimes that longing is rooted in some subconscious awareness that going through the process of carrying a child to term may alter their body in ways that are potentially for the best.
This would be really hard to prove. We have no means to see what the biological outcome would be for the same woman with and without the pregnancy experience. But I am in remarkably good health for someone with my genetic disorder and I credit my two pregnancies with some portion of that fact.
It's not only about the woman and her body. It's also about the child and the relationship between woman and child.
Our lives don't start when we leave the womb. Our first experiences are inside of it, when we are immensely close with the mother - hell, we are inside of her body.
So... It's also about sharing this first experiences and about bonding with the child. Something that is not possible with a surrogate mother. Or rather, something that happens to the surrogate mother instead. I don't think that 'handing the baby over' can ever be easy for that reason.
Artificial wombs are coming. I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
I think that artificial wombs will initially be challenged by feminist and conservative groups, but will end up being accepted, first with wealthy Western women, but eventually by everyone else.
I have never considered that women might choose to carry a child, if they weren't required due to technological and scientific advances.
This reminds me of a peculiar condition my mother was suffering from. She had to consume this particular tablet everyday to keep her cough and cold at bay. When she began carrying my sister, she was told by the Gynac that she had to stop consuming the tablet as it would harm the baby. She stopped the tablet and after 3-4 days of trouble, her cough and cold problem simply disappeared. Ever since, she never had to consume the tablet again.
> While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother?
Or even just adoption. Adoption is far cheaper as well.
There are plenty of reasons why people want their own biological children... but this seems like it carries a ton more risk with it. With complications from the transplant and heck even just childbirth.
Adoption on the other hand can be a risky path, leading to a different kind of problems, and some are very hard for parents. Everybody wants their sons being healthy and able to have a normal life but this is not always guaranteed with adoption. Some countries use shady practices and lie to the parents to obtain an emotional (not logical) choice. The cheaper the worst. Systematic racketeering is the minor of them. "Forgetting" about some important condition or omiting relevant medical information is much worse.
Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria prohibit all forms of surrogacy. So, this gives women in those countries the option of having a child legally.
Lucky for them there are no enforced prerequisites (i.e., test and/or license) for becoming a parent.
I don't doubt some level of that drive exists. What feels questionable is the sanity (?) of going to such extreme lengths to pursue it? As if there is a complete unawareness of the bigger picture.
Let’s say you lost your testicles due to cancer, but there’s a new procedure that can grow new ones from your stem cells. It’s experimental and will cost $150,000. Before having your cancerous testes removed you stored sperm.
Are you really surprised that some men who want to be fathers would choose to have the procedure rather than using their own previously stored sperm?
Yes. In fact, much more surprised than in this case - I can at least see why would you want to have your baby grow inside you. Doing experimental surgery just so you can have fresh sperm seems absurd to me.
That's pretty much the worst example you could have come up with. Carrying a child inside of you, is no stretch of the imagination equivalent to impregnating someone the old fashioned way. No man in their right mind would put up $150,000 in experimental money, when they have their own stored semen. Sure, if none exists maybe, but doing all that just so you can use fresh? That's just silly. It's still your DNA, and you can still have sex.
I'd probably be very wary at that point of going into the hospital any more than I have to, especially for experimental treatments. I'm surprised everyone is so sanguine about things like that; you're enduring invasive surgery, and experimental methods that could easily fail and cause serious side effects. I'd only take it if the situation was dire and there was no other option.
Using it for non life-threatening issues would be putting a lot of stress and risk on myself and my body for little reason.
Well, yes I'm shocked that someone would go to great expense, risk their life, and use scarce research resources in a completely unnatural effort to do something "naturally"... but I shouldn't be.
Can you harvest(1) eggs from a woman without a uterus? I don't see how you would. To get to the ovaries of a woman without a uterus you'd need to cut her open.
Probably well studied in pregnant moms with cancer or transplants. I would guess not a big impact as far as we know today. First there are cases where the maternal immune system attacks the fetus. Second the placenta generates immunosuppressants to prevent that, third, the fetus itself and the baby at birth does not have any innate immunity. In fact the baby relies on the moms immunity after birth.
How far are we from completely artificial uterus with no need for human body? If we plan to colonize other planets, we need literal "baby factories". How far are we from this technology? (regardless of dystopian vibe)
Earlier this year researchers got the first artificial uterus for sheep working. That one is aiming more at keeping extremely premature babies alive and developing for a few weeks than at actually controlling the full range of embryonic development, but I think that's a matter of time.
Could you imagine something that equalizes the playing field more between men and women? This provides the ability for people to have a child without the woman having to gestate the fetus for 9 months? None of the terrible side effects of pregnancy, none of the pain. Sounds pretty idealistic to me.
I’ve heard this discussed before the first of these procedures was successful.
Obviously a very interesting idea but for men (or people who were born men) the correct hormone issue is HUGE.
You’d have to give the correct amount of hormones at the correct time with those amounts changing every day (and possibly during the day). It’s an MASSIVE challenge and we may not even know what those correct dosages are right now. I mean has anyone ever done a record of the hormone levels for woman’s pregnancy for even two tests per day during the entire term?
And that’s assuming it static. If the correct hormone levels react to the way the baby is developing in someway (and I assume they must) then the challenge gets even greater.
The doctors on the podcast or in the article (I don’t remember where) seems to imply that what was done for this woman was basically trivial in comparison to making it possible for a man.
Given where the technology is now, there's no scenario where thousands of men won't be doing this within a few decades. It'll get easier, safer and cheaper over the next 10-15 years of experimentation and development, putting it within reach of a lot more people. The number count won't be very high early on, it'll still be an incredible technological achievement.
If 30 years out just 1 in 100,000 men are doing this at a given time, it'd be over 100,000 male births annually on the planet.
I doubt this procedure will catch on with men, but artificial wombs are coming sooner or later.
Personally, I think this will, in modern historical terms, be the most significant catalyst in equalizing the genders. But I don't expect feminist groups to embrace it with open arms.
menstruation would only be a component if the transplanted organs included functional ovaries and fallopian tubes. women who have full ovariectomy do not mensturate afterwards, as a slightly related example.
there are existing procedures to help facilitate implantation and regulate hormones that have high success rate (most common is ivf).
however, vaginal canal can also be useful to expel discharge and in case of pregnancy, placental fluid/sac -- but in a theoretical case of implanted uterus only, I wonder if "including" a vaginal canal would be more symbolic than medically necessary?
I don't see how a person with a transplanted uterus would need to menstruate. The role of the uterus is to facilitate pregnancy. Just as many women do not menstruate when taking oral contraceptive pills, just so could a transplant recipient not menstruate.
I find it interesting that the Baylor team chose a shorter timeframe from surgery to implantation with success. According to the article, the initial thought was that a longer wait time gave a chance for the women to heal, but the Baylor team thought the immune-system-suppressants (used to ensure the body does not reject a foreign organ) too harmful to continue for long periods.
From the article we know that each uterus recipient can have up to two births before the uterus is removed. But specifically when it is removed after that possible second birth I'm not sure. Looked around a bit and couldn't find anything. I'm assuming that would make the most sense, but I'm not a surgeon.
The "hundreds of thousands of dollars" cost is a bit concerning to me.
I'm also guessing it will difficult to bring the cost down since it requires a donor uterus.
Transplants are expensive (not just the procedure, all the after-care for the rest of the life), and leading-edge medical treatment will continue to be expensive, even if we can get the cost of transplantation itself down (my hunch is that most of the hundreds of thousands is in the cost of the surgeons, the cost of the medical facility, and all the intense recovery from extremely invasive surgery stuff).
In a reasonable universe, things like this would be discussed openly in terms of public-vs-private health care coverage, limits of cost, and liability for "uncaused" stuff (genetic bad luck, etc) vs "caused" stuff (e.g. alcoholic or obeseity-caused cirrhosis) so that we weren't simply writing blank checks with future people's money. Especially with the potential to grow organs - now your rate limiter on the costs is potentially gone! But in the US we can't even decide that people deserve health care access at all, so discussing the limits of it will have to wait for later, I suppose.
The price will be brought down through other methods, specifically cloning. It won't make sense at all to rely on donor organs. At our current rate of improvement on cloning / growing organs and tissue, we'll be able to do it in the next decade or two.
> The cost of a uterus transplantation is estimated to be around SEK 100,000 per patient. [...]
> Will this cost the patient anything?
> No. The first initial experiments with uterus transplantation will be covered entirely by research funding.
Apparently some of the research also came from a Professor in the US:
> The team learned this technique at the University of Connecticut and received help at the beginning from Professor John McCracken, who is a pioneer in reproductive medical research. It took about a year before the autotransplantation method on sheep worked well.
Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this, or if they did there might be a really limited supply. (I suppose the supply would be inherently limited anyway by how many available uteri there are)
Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer. For example apparently private insurance is becoming more popular in Sweden:
> The number of people purchasing supplementary private insurance is rapidly increasing, from 2.3 per cent of the population in 2004 (Swedish Insurance Federation 2004) to approximately 4.6 per cent in 2008 (Trygg-Hansa 2008). The voluntary health insurance mainly gives quick access to a specialist and allows for jumping the waiting queue for elective surgery (Glenngård et al. 2005).
> Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this,
I wouldn't think they would, but the existence of a single-payer system didn't prevent research on this.
> Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer.
What you mean in this case is purely single-payer. Paying for things that are outside of normal health care, like fancy private rooms or plastic surgery don't seem like they would have a negative effect. Getting quick access to a specialist seems problematic, though, but maybe the quick access to a specialist means ability to quickly consult with a foreign specialist; there's not a lot of detail there.
I am actually a Swedish citizen and I'm happy we still go partiallly by Keynes and not Friedman. So the taxes I'm paying I'm happy goes partially towards the betterment of all of humanity.
A functioning public sector with regulation drives technological EVOLUTION as all markets stagnate wo regulation and injections of assets.
Normally this would be a nit-pick, but it's a potentially significant one here since the medical center isn't religiously affiliated: Baylor the hospital system isn't affiliated with the university these days.
From the article (not all contiguous but related):
> A new frontier, uterus transplants are seen as a source of hope for women who cannot give birth because they were born without a uterus or had to have it removed because of cancer, other illness or complications from childbirth. Researchers estimate that in the United States, 50,000 women might be candidates.
> The transplants are meant to be temporary, left in place just long enough for a woman to have one or two children, and then removed so she can stop taking the immune-suppressing drugs needed to prevent organ rejection.
> The transplants are now experimental, with much of the cost covered by research funds. But they are expensive, and if they become part of medical practice, will probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is not clear that insurers will pay, and Dr. Testa acknowledged that many women who want the surgery will not be able to afford it.
While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother? I've heard the price of a surrogate is $30-50K.
While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother? I've heard the price of a surrogate is $30-50K.
That sounds rhetorical, but I'll bite anyway.
Some women really long for the experience of childbirth. This may not be entirely psychological. Giving birth has significant impact on a woman's physiology. In addition to changing the shape of the hips and often other details like that, it leaves a woman a chimera for many years. Because her blood and the blood of the baby mix, she carries cells from the baby for many years afterwards.
I have a genetic disorder. I have two biological sons. I was not diagnosed until they were about 12 and 14 years old, so I didn't (consciously) know about my condition at the time that I was making reproductive choices (though I did know I was always "sickly").
My first pregnancy significantly impacted how I eat. I removed a number of things from my diet to cope with my difficult pregnancy and many were never added back into my diet. I have reason to believe this did my health a lot of good. For example, it cured the chronic, sever vaginal yeast infections I had for more than two years prior that pregnancy. I never again had chronic, severe yeast infections.
I have read up a bit on pregnancy-induced chimerism and talked a bit with people online about it and talked a fair amount with my sons. I have come to think that some women long for a baby because it can have a profound impact on a woman's body in ways we don't fully understand and perhaps sometimes that longing is rooted in some subconscious awareness that going through the process of carrying a child to term may alter their body in ways that are potentially for the best.
This would be really hard to prove. We have no means to see what the biological outcome would be for the same woman with and without the pregnancy experience. But I am in remarkably good health for someone with my genetic disorder and I credit my two pregnancies with some portion of that fact.
It's not only about the woman and her body. It's also about the child and the relationship between woman and child. Our lives don't start when we leave the womb. Our first experiences are inside of it, when we are immensely close with the mother - hell, we are inside of her body. So... It's also about sharing this first experiences and about bonding with the child. Something that is not possible with a surrogate mother. Or rather, something that happens to the surrogate mother instead. I don't think that 'handing the baby over' can ever be easy for that reason.
2 replies →
That is quite interesting to hear from a woman.
Artificial wombs are coming. I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
I think that artificial wombs will initially be challenged by feminist and conservative groups, but will end up being accepted, first with wealthy Western women, but eventually by everyone else.
I have never considered that women might choose to carry a child, if they weren't required due to technological and scientific advances.
41 replies →
This reminds me of a peculiar condition my mother was suffering from. She had to consume this particular tablet everyday to keep her cough and cold at bay. When she began carrying my sister, she was told by the Gynac that she had to stop consuming the tablet as it would harm the baby. She stopped the tablet and after 3-4 days of trouble, her cough and cold problem simply disappeared. Ever since, she never had to consume the tablet again.
> Because her blood and the blood of the baby mix, she carries cells from the baby for many years afterwards.
This is not true. If the baby had AB blood and the mother had A, then the baby's blood cells would be attacked by the mother's.
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Do you feel it’s fair to say that women generally long for childbirth because that’s what selection pressures in the environment left us with?
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Wow, that sounds intense/neat. Thanks for sharing.
So you are saying that other people should bear the cost for your incredibly complex and expensive procedure because "desire".
The tax on high income earners is so high. I'm tired of paying so much for things like Uterous implants.
This is why I'm leaving this godforsaken country and will be contributing to a more free country where a man is actually valued.
#MeToo
> While the science is amazing, why go this route rather than having a surrogate mother?
Or even just adoption. Adoption is far cheaper as well.
There are plenty of reasons why people want their own biological children... but this seems like it carries a ton more risk with it. With complications from the transplant and heck even just childbirth.
Surrogacy is illegal in some places and countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogacy_laws_by_country
Adoption on the other hand can be a risky path, leading to a different kind of problems, and some are very hard for parents. Everybody wants their sons being healthy and able to have a normal life but this is not always guaranteed with adoption. Some countries use shady practices and lie to the parents to obtain an emotional (not logical) choice. The cheaper the worst. Systematic racketeering is the minor of them. "Forgetting" about some important condition or omiting relevant medical information is much worse.
Yes that's what I was trying to get at. The increased cost comes with significantly increased risk yet the same end result (a biological child).
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Adoptions in the US cost ~$40k, a lot more then the 10-15k for pregnancy.
3 replies →
Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria prohibit all forms of surrogacy. So, this gives women in those countries the option of having a child legally.
Many, many women wish to carry their own children. Some want to do that this badly.
"Want" as in they are biologically wired to want to do so; hormones/evolution/etc.
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Sure, but I don't think any insurance should ever pay for this.
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And they will petition the government to tax you enough to make it happen. They are doing soon.
Lucky for them there are no enforced prerequisites (i.e., test and/or license) for becoming a parent.
I don't doubt some level of that drive exists. What feels questionable is the sanity (?) of going to such extreme lengths to pursue it? As if there is a complete unawareness of the bigger picture.
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Let’s say you lost your testicles due to cancer, but there’s a new procedure that can grow new ones from your stem cells. It’s experimental and will cost $150,000. Before having your cancerous testes removed you stored sperm.
Are you really surprised that some men who want to be fathers would choose to have the procedure rather than using their own previously stored sperm?
Yes I'm surprised. I'd want my testicles back for other reasons maybe, but if I had stored sperm I don't see why to have an expensive operation.
Yes. In fact, much more surprised than in this case - I can at least see why would you want to have your baby grow inside you. Doing experimental surgery just so you can have fresh sperm seems absurd to me.
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That's pretty much the worst example you could have come up with. Carrying a child inside of you, is no stretch of the imagination equivalent to impregnating someone the old fashioned way. No man in their right mind would put up $150,000 in experimental money, when they have their own stored semen. Sure, if none exists maybe, but doing all that just so you can use fresh? That's just silly. It's still your DNA, and you can still have sex.
I'd probably be very wary at that point of going into the hospital any more than I have to, especially for experimental treatments. I'm surprised everyone is so sanguine about things like that; you're enduring invasive surgery, and experimental methods that could easily fail and cause serious side effects. I'd only take it if the situation was dire and there was no other option.
Using it for non life-threatening issues would be putting a lot of stress and risk on myself and my body for little reason.
Well, yes I'm shocked that someone would go to great expense, risk their life, and use scarce research resources in a completely unnatural effort to do something "naturally"... but I shouldn't be.
Because rule 34... someone will get off on it.
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I think it is incredibly cool that we can essentially move a uterus from one woman to several others.
Startup idea: Uterent™
Can you harvest(1) eggs from a woman without a uterus? I don't see how you would. To get to the ovaries of a woman without a uterus you'd need to cut her open.
(1) is that the correct terminology?
Taken a step further..why not adopt?
While impressive it feels too much like a First World Problem. Aren't there any real problems this team could have solved?
> While impressive it feels too much like a First World Problem. Aren't there any real problems this team could have solved?
Talk to any couple who has had difficulty conceiving, and the humanity of this "first world problem" gets brought into perspective.
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In the US the difficulty (factoring in stress, disappointment, and costs) of various options for infertile partners in ascending order:
Unfortunately "Why not adopt" is rarely the simplest option for most people.
What effect do immunosuppressors have on the fetus?
Probably well studied in pregnant moms with cancer or transplants. I would guess not a big impact as far as we know today. First there are cases where the maternal immune system attacks the fetus. Second the placenta generates immunosuppressants to prevent that, third, the fetus itself and the baby at birth does not have any innate immunity. In fact the baby relies on the moms immunity after birth.
Surrogate motherhood is a very traumatising experience.
How far are we from completely artificial uterus with no need for human body? If we plan to colonize other planets, we need literal "baby factories". How far are we from this technology? (regardless of dystopian vibe)
Earlier this year researchers got the first artificial uterus for sheep working. That one is aiming more at keeping extremely premature babies alive and developing for a few weeks than at actually controlling the full range of embryonic development, but I think that's a matter of time.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128851-artificial-womb...
Why would we need non-human baby factories?
Could you imagine something that equalizes the playing field more between men and women? This provides the ability for people to have a child without the woman having to gestate the fetus for 9 months? None of the terrible side effects of pregnancy, none of the pain. Sounds pretty idealistic to me.
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I dunno about 'need', but I guess you could avoid the whole 'sending people' problem that way. DNA is a lot more durable.
That'd be a weird upbringing, huh?
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I meant without the need of having uterus inside a (living) human being. Literally growing human babies in factories.
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Generation starships!
I first read " Woman with Transparent Uterus Gives Birth, the First in the U.S "
Any reason a man couldn't get one, with correct hormones?
I’ve heard this discussed before the first of these procedures was successful.
Obviously a very interesting idea but for men (or people who were born men) the correct hormone issue is HUGE.
You’d have to give the correct amount of hormones at the correct time with those amounts changing every day (and possibly during the day). It’s an MASSIVE challenge and we may not even know what those correct dosages are right now. I mean has anyone ever done a record of the hormone levels for woman’s pregnancy for even two tests per day during the entire term?
And that’s assuming it static. If the correct hormone levels react to the way the baby is developing in someway (and I assume they must) then the challenge gets even greater.
The doctors on the podcast or in the article (I don’t remember where) seems to imply that what was done for this woman was basically trivial in comparison to making it possible for a man.
Given where the technology is now, there's no scenario where thousands of men won't be doing this within a few decades. It'll get easier, safer and cheaper over the next 10-15 years of experimentation and development, putting it within reach of a lot more people. The number count won't be very high early on, it'll still be an incredible technological achievement.
If 30 years out just 1 in 100,000 men are doing this at a given time, it'd be over 100,000 male births annually on the planet.
I doubt this procedure will catch on with men, but artificial wombs are coming sooner or later.
Personally, I think this will, in modern historical terms, be the most significant catalyst in equalizing the genders. But I don't expect feminist groups to embrace it with open arms.
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He would also need a vaginal canal so he could menstrate. That's possible with surgery, but it'd be a deal breaker for most men.
menstruation would only be a component if the transplanted organs included functional ovaries and fallopian tubes. women who have full ovariectomy do not mensturate afterwards, as a slightly related example.
there are existing procedures to help facilitate implantation and regulate hormones that have high success rate (most common is ivf).
however, vaginal canal can also be useful to expel discharge and in case of pregnancy, placental fluid/sac -- but in a theoretical case of implanted uterus only, I wonder if "including" a vaginal canal would be more symbolic than medically necessary?
1 reply →
I don't see how a person with a transplanted uterus would need to menstruate. The role of the uterus is to facilitate pregnancy. Just as many women do not menstruate when taking oral contraceptive pills, just so could a transplant recipient not menstruate.
1 reply →
Wait, how do you get a man to produce eggs? Aren’t they present in a woman’s body at birth?
A male pelvis is more narrow than a female pelvis.
All the babies delivered so far from a uterus transplant were C-sections (as explained in article).
C-sections are already a thing.
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Please no.
Now that's an interesting question
It may be important for the baby's health to nurse with their biological mother.
Men, with the right hormones, are able to lactate and produce milk. (In some rare cases men lactate naturally without hormone injections)
Do you want your penis sliced up and turned inside-out to make a uterus?
I think an elite few trans women might get it, but I don't expect men would want to.
Um, that makes a vagina, not a uterus. There isn't enough material in the penis to do that much :/
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I find it interesting that the Baylor team chose a shorter timeframe from surgery to implantation with success. According to the article, the initial thought was that a longer wait time gave a chance for the women to heal, but the Baylor team thought the immune-system-suppressants (used to ensure the body does not reject a foreign organ) too harmful to continue for long periods.
Do we know if they removed the uterus during the same surgery as the c-section, or was it done later?
From the article we know that each uterus recipient can have up to two births before the uterus is removed. But specifically when it is removed after that possible second birth I'm not sure. Looked around a bit and couldn't find anything. I'm assuming that would make the most sense, but I'm not a surgeon.
Pretty fascinating science.
The "hundreds of thousands of dollars" cost is a bit concerning to me. I'm also guessing it will difficult to bring the cost down since it requires a donor uterus.
Transplants are expensive (not just the procedure, all the after-care for the rest of the life), and leading-edge medical treatment will continue to be expensive, even if we can get the cost of transplantation itself down (my hunch is that most of the hundreds of thousands is in the cost of the surgeons, the cost of the medical facility, and all the intense recovery from extremely invasive surgery stuff).
In a reasonable universe, things like this would be discussed openly in terms of public-vs-private health care coverage, limits of cost, and liability for "uncaused" stuff (genetic bad luck, etc) vs "caused" stuff (e.g. alcoholic or obeseity-caused cirrhosis) so that we weren't simply writing blank checks with future people's money. Especially with the potential to grow organs - now your rate limiter on the costs is potentially gone! But in the US we can't even decide that people deserve health care access at all, so discussing the limits of it will have to wait for later, I suppose.
The price will be brought down through other methods, specifically cloning. It won't make sense at all to rely on donor organs. At our current rate of improvement on cloning / growing organs and tissue, we'll be able to do it in the next decade or two.
Pregnancy already has many associated risks. This may increase the odds substantially.
Plus, pregnancy while taking a lot of immunosuppresant drugs doesn't sound like a really good idea.
To be fair, what did you think she was going to do with it? This shouldn’t be a surprise!
>Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden
Just to show that single payer system can be good for medical innovation, not just universal healthcare.
It looks like the swedish transplants were funded by research at a university, not insurance: http://sahlgrenska.gu.se/english/research/uterus/questions (though perhaps that's a distinction without a difference?)
> The cost of a uterus transplantation is estimated to be around SEK 100,000 per patient. [...] > Will this cost the patient anything? > No. The first initial experiments with uterus transplantation will be covered entirely by research funding.
Apparently some of the research also came from a Professor in the US:
> The team learned this technique at the University of Connecticut and received help at the beginning from Professor John McCracken, who is a pioneer in reproductive medical research. It took about a year before the autotransplantation method on sheep worked well.
Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this, or if they did there might be a really limited supply. (I suppose the supply would be inherently limited anyway by how many available uteri there are)
Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer. For example apparently private insurance is becoming more popular in Sweden:
> The number of people purchasing supplementary private insurance is rapidly increasing, from 2.3 per cent of the population in 2004 (Swedish Insurance Federation 2004) to approximately 4.6 per cent in 2008 (Trygg-Hansa 2008). The voluntary health insurance mainly gives quick access to a specialist and allows for jumping the waiting queue for elective surgery (Glenngård et al. 2005).
http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/98417/E9...
> Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this,
I wouldn't think they would, but the existence of a single-payer system didn't prevent research on this.
> Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer.
What you mean in this case is purely single-payer. Paying for things that are outside of normal health care, like fancy private rooms or plastic surgery don't seem like they would have a negative effect. Getting quick access to a specialist seems problematic, though, but maybe the quick access to a specialist means ability to quickly consult with a foreign specialist; there's not a lot of detail there.
I am actually a Swedish citizen and I'm happy we still go partiallly by Keynes and not Friedman. So the taxes I'm paying I'm happy goes partially towards the betterment of all of humanity. A functioning public sector with regulation drives technological EVOLUTION as all markets stagnate wo regulation and injections of assets.
I would rather this innovation not be made with my taxes. The money thrown at this could have done so much elsewhere.
Luckily Sweden is a civilised country where individuals don’t get to choose the medical needs of other people they don’t know.
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I can't wait to find out from the republicans why this is an abomination before the lord our god.
Why incite a political discussion? The connection this article has to politics is extrapolated in your mind for one purpose.
You will probably find they're in favour of bringing more of "their kind" into the world.
Don't most people feel the exact same way ?
What's "their kind?"
Your statement contrasts amusingly with the actual context.
This occurred at a conservative-leaning, Baptist university in Texas: Baylor.
Normally this would be a nit-pick, but it's a potentially significant one here since the medical center isn't religiously affiliated: Baylor the hospital system isn't affiliated with the university these days.
It's affiliated with Texas A&M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylor_University_Medical_Cent...
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The uni is actually in Waco, about 150+ miles south of where the hospital is. Not sure how connected they are these days.
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Useful! It was becoming concerning how few people there are on the planet, good to see another means of making more.
/s