Transgender women can now have babies. Shocking but true. They now have cause to be happy as the clamour for those who were born male to experience ch
Transgender women can now have babies. Shocking but true. They now have cause to be happy as the clamour for those who were born male to experience child birth may now be possible as they can now be given womb transplants. . Fertility experts say taxpayers should fund such transplants for those who identify as women, on the basis of equality enshrined in law.
Medical ethics lawyer, Dr Amel Alghrani of Liverpool University, predicts that a successful programme would lead to others demanding wombs, including gay and straight men who want to experience the joys of carrying a child.
But critics say the NHS should not waste precious resources merely to allow trans-women to pursue an authentic female experience. Women’s campaigner Laura Perrins said: “Most taxpayers will not think this is a good use of resources. It raises profound ethical and moral issues that will have an impact on women’s rights. It will impinge on the meaning of motherhood and womanhood.”
However, gynaecologists are increasingly convinced that implanting a donor womb into a person born with male organs is possible, with one top doctor saying it is just a decade away. They believe the recent success of uterine transplantation in women born without wombs has drawn it a step closer.
Since 2014, at least five babies have been born to womb-less women after receiving donor wombs in a series of pioneering operations at Gothenburg University in Sweden and it is the remarkable success of the Swedish team that has triggered calls by transgender women for them to receive womb transplants too.
Consultant gynecologist, Dr Arianna D’Angelo, of the NHS’s Wales Fertility Institute, said it was right from an ethical point of view.
‘We already have fertility preservation for transgender people, to give them the possibility to have their own genetic child,’ she said.
‘So I don’t see much of a difference between that and actually delivering their own child. If we are saying we should have equality and we have legislation, that is, defending the rights of transgender people, I do not see why not. Their rights to equal treatment, are actually enshrined in legislation,” said Dr Francoise Shelfield, a clinical lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology at University College London, who has treated infertile NHS patients for 30 years, who added her support.
According to Dr Alghrani, director of Liverpool University’s Health Law & Regulation Unit and a trained barrister, makes a case as well by saying that this would revolutionize reproduction.
“It could lead others to demand transplants, including straight men, allowing for couples to jointly share the reproductive burdens and joys of pregnancy. Homosexual couples may also wish to procreate in this fashion, while single men may opt for it to avoid surrogacy.”
The doctors’ calls come as Hayden Cross, the first British female-to-male transsexual to become pregnant, is due to give birth. Mr Cross, 21, from Gloucester, who was born Paige, put his sex-change on hold last year so he could have a baby, doing so with sperm from an online donor.
