This news is about a month old, but I figure it hasn't been covered in this forum yet.

We’ve all heard of kidney transplants and heart transplants, but how many of us have ever thought of transplanting an entire womb? By the end of September this year, 10 women in the UK had been given approval by the Health Research Authority to go through the operation. The team of doctors, led by Dr. Smith, will be taking the donor wombs from brain-dead (though still living) patients. The procedure is to be performed by 12 doctors and it is estimated that the transplant operation will take around 6 hours. To reduce the risk of the donated womb being rejected, the women will then take immunosuppressant drugs for 12 months after the operation and again during their pregnancy. Unfortunately, the babies born from these wombs will not be birthed traditionally, and the women will have a cesarean section performed on them to reduce damage to the transplanted womb.

This is not the first time that womb transplants have appeared on the news radar. In 2014, a Swedish woman gave birth to the first ever womb transplant baby. It was this phenomenon that inspired the current ongoing project in the UK. Before the project can commence, £500,000 ($760,000) must be raised by Dr. Smith and his team. However, if the project meets its goals, the first few babies born from a womb transplant in the UK could come as early as 2017.

Ethical implications aside, the commercialization of this operation could open many new doors in the scientific and medical fields. More specifically, ectogenesis could soon become a reality. If viable fetuses can grow in a transplanted womb, then who is to say that they can’t grow in an artificial womb? Or maybe even in conditions outside of a biological organ? That is not to say that we can just start growing babies out of petri dishes, but at this rate, the future holds a very real possibility of this becoming a reality.

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