Lisa Kaplan Gordon


Will men be able to give birth sooner than, well,
never?
That’s the question provoked by last week’s
announcement that the Cleveland Clinic is
performing uterus transplant surgery on women
who were born without a womb or whose uterus is
diseased or malfunctioning. Hearing the news, we,
and some of you, wondered: If science can
transplant a uterus into a woman, can it transplant
one into a man?
The answer is yes. Theoretically, men could receive
a uterus, carry a baby to term, and give birth. But
what really blew our minds is that the day of male
pregnancy is closer than you’d think.
“My guess is five, 10 years away, maybe sooner,”
says Dr. Karine Chung, director of the fertility
preservation program at the University of Southern
California’s Keck School of Medicine. Today,
medical advances let transgender women adjust
their biochemistry to suppress male and introduce
female hormones, have breasts that can lactate, and
obtain surgically constructed vaginas that include a
“ neoclitoris,” which allows sensation.
Until now, however, a place to carry the fetus — a
womb of its own — was a major missing link.
Uterus transplants could conceivably surmount that
hurdle.
“I’d bet just about every transgender person who is
female will want to do it, if it were covered by
insurance,” says Dr. Christine McGinn, a New Hope,
Pa., plastic surgeon who performs transgender
surgeries on men and women and is a consultant to
the new movie The Danish Girl , about one of the first
recipients of sex reassignment surgery.
McGinn, a transgender woman and mother of twins,
says the “human drive to be a mother for a woman
is a very serious thing. Transgender women are no
different.”
Uterus transplants are still in the research stage for
women suffering from uterine factor infertility
(UFI). A Swedish team already has successfully
transplanted uteri harvested from live donors and
achieved five pregnancies and four live births. In
the coming months, the Cleveland Clinic team plans
to transplant uteri from deceased donors into UFI
female patients.
Transplant surgery is difficult and dangerous,
requiring patients to take antirejection drugs
throughout their pregnancies, putting them at risk
for infection. But for many women — and
presumably for many transitioning women — the
risk is worth the reward.
However, biological women have a leg up on
biological males when it comes to accepting and
nurturing a transplanted uterus. Women already
have: vasculature needed to feed the uterus with
blood, pelvic ligaments designed to support a
uterus, a vagina and cervix, and natural hormones
that prepare the uterus for implantation and
support the pregnancy.
Men have none of those support systems —
naturally — but none are impossible to create.
“Male and female anatomy is not that different,”
says Chung. “Probably at some point, somebody will
figure out how to make that work.”
In fact, medical techniques already
exist to overcome many obstacles to
male pregnancy.
1. Hormone therapy can shut off testosterone and
introduce progesterone and estrogen needed to
prepare the uterus for pregnancy.
2. Even though males do not have uterine veins and
arteries needed to nurture the womb, it’s possible
to attach a branch of a large vessel, like the internal
iliac, to the uterus. “It’s doable, it just hasn’t been
done,” Chung says.
3. Although it’s preferable for a vagina to support the
uterus, it’s possible to attach a transplanted uterus
to other ligaments in the pelvis.
At the moment, the thorniest problem standing
between men and pregnancy is transferring an
embryo grown in vitro into the transplanted womb.
The usual route for women undergoing fertility
treatments is through the vagina and cervix and into
the uterus. But since a uterus has never been
transplanted into a biological male, techniques to
connect a constructed vagina to a transplanted
uterus have not been attempted. But Dr. Elliot
Jacobs, a Manhattan plastic surgeon, says that
theoretically, “Connecting the two is not a major
surgical feat.”
Perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle will be
the economics: Transplants are wildly expensive,
ranging from $25,000 for a corneal transplant to
$1.3 million for a heart, according to the National
Foundation of Transplants. We can’t even begin to
guess how much a uterus transplant will cost if the
surgery makes it out of the research phase, and
chances are slim that insurance companies will pay
for it.
“It’s a class issue; you’ll only have wealthy people
able to do this,” says McGinn, who is featured in the
documentary TRANS .
Also, transplanting uteri into men provokes ethical
questions about long-term health outcomes for
transplant recipients and subsequent children, and
the benefit to society of using so many resources for
men and women to experience the joy of birth.
“Are people going to want to do it? Yes,” says Dr.
Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at the NYU
School of Medicine. “But I don’t see making this a
priority. In terms of making the best use of scarce
resources, this won’t get over the threshold.
https://www.yahoo.com/health/surgery-could-give-men-wombs-1302360099545142.html

Wetin person no go hear.

I don't know why I would want to give birth by my self when I can easily have a woman do it. + A woman's eggs would still be needed.