The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
prob also raising a child way expensier if you factor uni and such into it vs UK
For a comparison, check out what a 1-month supply of a biologic drug costs: https://www.goodrx.com/stelara
A rare, congenital, condition.
I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now”
Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.
You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.
Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service.
The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was.
A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
Physical "sex" is never only binary.
1 in 1500 births is DSD and not binary (aka intersex but that term is outdated)
The woman in this example is DSD
There are dozens of different types of women who are DSD
Some women who are DSD would most definitely fail most genetics tests to prove "women" (like the SRY test that some sports federations use)
Yet some of the women who "fail" SRY tests can give birth, typically using a donated egg or in this case other organs because their organs are either damaged or cancerous from partially activated SRY, etc.
1 in 1500 is a LOT of people
Every time you hear a "bathroom assigned at birth" harassment, realize they are also oppressing millions of women who are DSD, not just transgender
So I don't see 1 in 1500 people being oppressed by the court ruling.
Some people who are DSD take great pride in being non-binary.
People who are DSD have been documented for CENTURIES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_people_in_history
But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known and set in stone, when their bible was invented, despite never having microscopes or telescopes or even eyeglasses
I don't know why you think this is a conservative lie. It is not.
The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her male or a third sex.
MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I don't feel it should be too hard an idea to struggle with.
That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation.
Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.
Where we want to end up is with artificial wombs because that will ultimately give individuals much more control over their reproduction and will do away with the onerous physiological and psychological stresses that pregnancy puts on women.
Would only have the sister's DNA if it was an ovary transplant.
Fun fact: fetal cells transmit back to the mother and can be spotted in virtually every organ afterwards - it's called "Fetomaternal cell microchimerism" [1].
It's not a far stretch to assume the transfer works also the other way around and you can detect maternal DNA in the fetus/child, but I'm not aware if there has been research around that.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357422...
Could someone born as a man have a transplanted womb and get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, in theory? anyone here with more medical knowledge who can comment on how likely that is to work at some point in the future?
This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
Keywords: fetal microchimerism, placental barrier, trophoblast invasion
https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...
Red in tooth and claw at every layer, from the smallest cell to the entire biosphere.
You can also flip the perspective the fetus is trying to survive in a hostile environment designed to strangle it. If it isn't clawing for every ounce of food and air it will become a miscarriage. It must interface with a system built for millenia designed to kill anything that doesn't have its code.
In truth, it is the equilibrium that evolution has achieved. Placenta must account for the most vicious fetus, and fetus must account for most vicious placenta.
sebazzz•2h ago