The removal of the female body from the process of human reproduction, a possibility imagined by generations of science fiction writers – from Mary Shelley, to Aldous Huxley, to Octavia E. Butler – may well be at hand. Or so says Christopher Inglefield, surgeon and founder of the London Transgender Clinic.
He has suggested that transwomen will soon be able to receive a uterine transplant and bear a child. Of course, patients would need to take artificial hormones and birth would have to take place by c-section, but otherwise, the procedure is “essentially identical” to that performed on natal women, since the “the actual ‘plumbing in’ is straightforward”.
It’s an optimistic prediction, to put it mildly. Worldwide, 11 babies have, to date, been born to mothers who have received uterine transplants. They have all been natal females with either a diseased or absent uterus, but an otherwise functioning reproductive system. The transplantation itself is challenging and only a small fraction of uterine transplantation procedures have so far resulted in a live birth.
This, though, starts to look easy when you compare it with the development of another form of reproduction technology: ectogenesis, or gestation outside of the body. Long a subject of interest for science fiction writers, now some researchers are hoping to make it a reality. In 2017, a team in Philadelphia succeeded in bringing a premature lamb to term inside what they called a ‘biobag’, which allows the foetus to continue developing outside of the mother’s body. The lamb was removed by c-section at the equivalent of 23-24 weeks gestation in humans, which is currently the cusp of viability for premature infants.
Some of the media reporting on the biobag, though, has been misleading. “An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next” announced one headline, misleadingly. A human embryo can potentially survive in vitro for two weeks following conception, and the biobag might offer 16-17 weeks of artificial gestation at the very end. But that still leaves us with half of the pregnancy untouched.
Perhaps one day these two technologies will meet in the middle, and the human uterus might finally become redundant. But, for now, Adrienne Rich’s 1976 assertion remains true: “All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body.”
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