I was asked this week if I thought womb transplants should be available on the NHS.
Transplant a womb into a woman born without one and give her the gift of carrying a baby. It sounds like a wonderful thing, doesn’t it? It is certainly a triumph of medicine, a miracle almost, like a liver transplant… but for me, the comparison ends there and let us not forget that without a new liver, you die, without a baby that you grow in your body, you don’t.
So how can I be so callous…. Well, I was interested in the reporting of the recent UK birth of a baby to a woman born without a womb. She received her sister’s womb, and this is often the way of these things currently: a relative donates. There was very little coverage of the sister, of her decision-making process, the surgery, which is major and her recovery.
In fact, she got just a cursory mention, like it was routine, easy and natural. I fear it is none of those things. It is major.
The argument comes forth that the donor was sure that they had completed their family. As a woman who had a baby at 21 and then another at 51, I am not sure that you can ever be 100 per cent sure.
Things change in life: you meet a new partner, something awful happens, you grow up. I know of a friend whose new husband had lost his wife and child in a car accident, and when she was 46, she crossed mountains to have a child she never thought she would have.
Had she donated her womb at 45, this would not have been an option. And as women are now having babies in their 50s, even 60s, with the aid of donor eggs, the fertility door is never as firmly closed as it once was.
I fear we are playing the board game Operation with real bodies. A Frankenstein nightmare - Renee Hoenderkamp
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Then there is the lifespan of the donated womb. It is designed to only stay in its new home for five years and then be removed and discarded. Many don’t even make it to five years. The anti-rejection drugs bring their own risks. So this precious gift is disposable. Imagine being faced with donating a loved one's organs at the most difficult time of our lives, only to know that said organ will be in the bin in five years.
And it raises the question of taking wombs as part of the donor programme – from the dead. Will we consider this just another useful body part that can be harvested from a dead body when a tragic accident befalls a woman?
Notwithstanding all of this, my real concern comes in around coercion and the ethics around this precious female body part. I fear that the market for ‘pre-loved wombs’ for sale will quickly turn into a wild west where poorer women from the developing world form fertile ground for the wealthy to exploit. We already see women and girls being paid for eggs. I am not opposed to this, in that there is no permanent or lasting damage and that woman can produce more eggs and use them herself whenever she chooses, not so once her womb has gone.
Women from China, India and other countries, where thick, long and beautiful hair is the norm, are paid what is to them a fortune to shave off their hair, which is then traded on the global hair market. Imagine being a woman and shaving off your hair… I actually can’t. But this is the crux: if I were poor enough with children to feed, I almost certainly would.
We already know that organ trafficking happens, despite being banned under international statute. And yet there is a thriving criminal black market and trade in any organ needed. It often results in the death of the donor, who may be a ‘willing’ donor for cash or an unwilling, kidnapped donor. Why would a uterus be any different? Imagine a desperate young woman in India forsaking her future childbearing for cash to this awful, barbaric trade? It will happen. Poor women will give up the most precious thing they have to wealthy women.
Already, surrogacy is a thriving industry where women are paid around the world to be the ‘oven’ for wealthy couples who, for varying reasons, can’t or don’t want to carry their own child. Sometimes that woman also throws in her eggs, too, and as she delivers her precious cargo, a human being, she hands it over immediately. In the UK, it is illegal to take a puppy from its mother before eight weeks of age, but not a baby.
Ripping a baby from the arms of a mother minutes after birth is, in my opinion, the most anti-nature thing a woman can do, and yet, for money, women are convinced that it's kind, altruistic, even. But, as opposed to womb transplants, at least that woman retains her ability to bear another child. In Thailand and India, surrogacy is now banned because they saw the rise of baby-farming by clinics using desperate girls.
And then we have the whole transgender movement. I have no doubt that if a man is prepared to surgically remove his penis and have a ‘faux vagina’ created in his body, then some of those men will jump at the chance to have a womb implanted too so that they may truly ‘be a woman’. Do they have the right to carry a baby? I think this is horrific, and imagine the damaged children requiring years of therapy to unpick their arrival and delivery into this world.
Have we really reached the stage where the child’s board game ‘Operation’, where you can just pluck out a body part with a pair of tweezers and hope that it goes well enough to avoid the fateful ‘buzz’, is real life now? I know that this kind of surgery is exciting for the doctors involved, that fame and possibly fortune will follow, but that doesn’t mean it should. Not all medical advances are advancing society, and for me, this one should be retired and banished to the history books as a Frankenstein ethical nightmare.
So let's get back to the question that prompted this. No, I don’t think this should be available on the NHS, I don’t think it should be available at all. I do support women to have babies, I think it is the most magical and rewarding thing a woman ever does, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to do it, sad as that is. There are plenty of children needing adoption, foster homes. I know there are fewer babies, but they are still children needing love and care.
There are other solutions that don’t require the reduction of women to their body parts, which can be rented, bought or even stolen for the satisfaction of another woman, or, god forbid, a man, to do what hitherto they couldn’t.
