Is fetus transplant possible?

The fundies came to my liberal school today, holding up their disgusting shock signs with the aborted fetuses on them. I really want to give them an opportunity to "adopt" and carry the unwanted fetuses themselves...But does the medical capability exist?

If only for the immune system issues,

Once they started having really great sex ed.

It would be great if the technology to do it existed, it would really end this debate once and for all.

which has become so intermixed with the uterine lining that it would be impossible to remove cleanly and insert into another uterus. The whole system is incredibly vascular, and the fetus would either suffocate or bleed to death before a transplant could be completed.

I know what you're thinking though.

I don't want to punish those rabid fools. I just want to march them back to the lunatic fringe where they'll be more comfortable.

Tell 'em to notice how Bush has done nothing but lip service in the area and send them to local republican headquarters. Maybe they'll get the clue that the ultra-rich republican elite thinks their fools, and go form their own party. That would bring balance to the world! :)

The fetus and placenta, and chorion, and umbilicus, and all the rest of the gestational materials, form a single semiallogenic or allogenic graft on the body of the pregnant woman which is usually attached to the lining of her uterus. The combined products forms a "reproductive graft" in mammals.

Like any graft a part of the material is recognized by the woman's body as foreign to her body (approximately 1% because most of the male contribution is still "human" like the woman and so is the same in both). The woman's body (immune system) tries to reject the graft but her immune system is dampened during pregnancy to prevent rejection.

In order to transplant from one uterus to another what would need to be done is to have the reproductive graft (all of it) and the part of the "donor" uterus it is attached to removed from the pregnant woman, and then this would have to be grafted onto the properly prepared uterus of the new "host". It would require anti-rejection drugs, of course, to prevent the "reproductive graft" graft from being rejected by the host and an almost instant vascular (blood) supply would be required for the placenta - which would be about the equivelant of transferring the NY phone exchange to Hong Kong and having it work.

The image, so often used by the anti-choice people, of an embryo/fetus floating free and being the entire reproductive material is, of course, totally false. The fatus, along with the rest of the reproductive graft is, at a molecular and hormonal level, a part of the woman - until it is rejected by her body by miscarriage or birth or is removed by terminating the pregnancy.

You will find gives you a little more information and detail.


- Eileen`s always in process page -

Eileen

When a pregnancy is terminated a single cell could be saved from the removed gestational material. The nucleus from this cell would then be removed and placed in an enucleated (neucleus removed) cell of the woman who is going to continue the pregnancy. This can then be implanted in the uterus of the host woman who will carry the "clone" of the original embryo/fetus through a normal pregnancy. Thus the original fetus would come to term with only a small interruption in the process and a little longer full term.

Do you think your anti-choiceers who were waving the fetal porn around will settle for cloning of fetuses?

Eileen

Could this single cell taken from the removed gestational material be frozen and used later? Or could the zygote be removed from the uterous and frozen for later use? (before this graft has formed)

I seem to remember hearing that sperm donated was actually frozen.

edit for clarity: by 'later use' I mean implanted back in a uterus, and have it grow normally until birth.

The cloning technique described is basically the way "Dolly" the sheep, in Scotland, was cloned so we know it works in mammals. Since we already cryogenically preserve pre-embryos there is also no reason why the reconstituted pre-embryo should not be treated likewise - although I know of no attempts at doing this so far.

This technique, of course, would mean that the woman who had terminated her pregnancy could also be the one to continue the pregnancy if she decided to do so at a later, and more appropriate, time of her choosing.

Eileen

but not yet...

In addition to low success rates, cloned animals tend to have more compromised immune function and higher rates of infection, tumor growth, and other disorders. Japanese studies have shown that cloned mice live in poor health and die early. About a third of the cloned calves born alive have died young, and many of them were abnormally large. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age.
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml#risks

I can see the fights over that one already. A couple sleeps together in college, and the woman gets pregnant. They split up, so the woman has the embryo removed and frozen. Fifteen years later she wants to have the embryo implanted again. What would the rights and responsibilities of the biological father be in that situation? Once the embryo is removed from the mother, does he have the right to demand that it be destroyed (after all, it's not a "her body" issue anymore)? Yikes, I don't look forward to the fight over this one.

I don't know if uteri is a real word, but uterus's just sounds odd :)

In 2002 a researcher at Cornell took a couple of endometrial cells and grew them into an artificial uterus. After that, his team successfully created a few embryos via IVF, and the embryos implanted into the fake uterus and started growing normally. He cut off the experiment after a few days to avoid violating US IVF research laws, but there was nothing to indicate that the growth couldn't have continued until the fetus reached term.

Because of restrictive US laws, other research since that experiment has occurred outside of the United States. Still, there are researchers RIGHT NOW who are looking at ways to transplant fetuses into these artificial wombs to avoid miscarriages in women having reproductive problems. At the rate this research is progressing, I'd bet good money that we'll be hearing about our first "lab grown" baby sometime in the next 10-15 years.

Once the artificial uterus is perfected, and since transplantation is an active part of the research, it's conceivable that we might see the situation arise where surgical abortion is banned in favor of surgical transplantation. Since the right of the woman to end her pregnancy wouldn't be impacted either way, I'm not sure where I stand on that question yet.

Even a xenotransplant into a pig or near hominid uterus would require the graft of the full gestational materials and a part of the "donor" uterus, and almost instantaneous blood supply on molecular basis, in order for the transplant to have any chance to succeed.

The Cornell experiment you reference simply was a variation on the current IVF practices where the pre-embryo is allowed to multiply for a longer time before insertion into the host so that the probability of successful IVF is increased and the number of pre-embryos (leading to multiple births if they all implant) can be reduced. The pre-embryo has not yet formed differential groups of cells which will become the placenta and the embryo and this is the stage used in IVF - although those who claim there is a baby in the zygote are loath to use the term "pre-embryo".

The "artificial uterus" you reference is not actually an artificial uterus but simply an artificially prepared endometrial lining which allowed implantation. There are 40 weeks and a full organism (a woman usually) required to maintain homeostasis, immunity, detoxifying, and nutrition etc over that period of time. If that uterus is not attached to that woman (or her living biological replacement) I certainly cannot see how a pregnancy could be carried to term.

The artificial uterus is a dream of anti-choice zealots - but is about as likely to happen as a man carrying a pregnancy to term and living to tell about it.

(BTW uteruses is the proper plural - in Latin it belongs to the same declension of nouns as octopus).


Eileen

:P