Blog | Subscribe | Free Trial | Contact Us | Cart | Donate | Planned Giving
Log In | Search
facebook
rss
twitter
  • CURRENT
    • Winter 2023
    • NEWSworthy: What’s Happening and What It Means to You
    • Blog
    • INSISTING ON LIFE
    • Pastoral Reflections
    • About Us
    • HLF In The News
    • LIBERTY TO DO WHAT? Hadley Arkes and Rusty Reno join George McKenna June 1, 2022 in New York
  • DINNER
    • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER 2022
    • HOST COMMITTEE Great Defender of Life Dinner 2022
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 Dinner Ticket
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 STUDENT or PREGNANCY CENTER STAFF Ticket
    • DINNER JOURNAL ADVERTISING 2022
  • ARCHIVE
    • Archive Spotlight
    • ISSUES IN HTML FORMAT
  • LEGACY
    • Planned Giving: Wills, Trusts, and Gifts of Stock
  • SHOP
    • Cart

BLOG

1 Comment

The Uterus: Now Another Hostage to Fortune

17 Nov 2015
Connie Marshner
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

 

Last week the Cleveland Clinic announced that a medical team there will soon be the first in the United States to transplant a uterus (fallopian tubes and ovaries not included).

Eight women have already begun the screening process. One travelled more than 1,000 miles to the clinic because she craves the experience of pregnancy: “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move,” she told the New York Times.

She wants a new experience for herself.

Too bad it isn’t the baby she craves.

The protocol at the Cleveland Clinic is that a woman has to have 10 frozen embryos in the freezer before her name goes on the waiting list for a uterine transplant. After she gets the transplant and is established on anti-rejection drugs, an embryo will be implanted, and after one or two pregnancies, the uterus will be removed. What will become of the “leftover” baby embryos in the freezer?

Sweden, where the technique was pioneered, has proven that a post-menopausal uterus is capable of gestating a pregnancy if implanted in a younger body. There, five mothers were the uterus donors for their own daughters. So a woman’s body part can be her own granddaughter’s “mother.” Did the world really need that medical frontier to be broken?

Will the world be better off because of what the Cleveland Clinic is doing here?

I wonder what it costs. I wonder if ObamaCare will cover it. ObamaCare already covers the costs of in vitro fertilization (around $10,000 per attempt) if a state defines it as an “essential health benefit.”

If ObamaCare doesn’t cover the costs, then only women wealthy enough to pay for the experience will benefit from the millions of medical research dollars already spent in pursuit of uterine transplantation. The powers that be at HHS will sooner or later see that inequality as indefensible and un-democratic, and mandate accordingly.

After all, more than a year ago HHS decreed that Medicare (i.e., you and I) must pay for sex change operations.

Isn’t health care supposed to be about healing diseases? What disease is uterus transplantation curing?  

Please note:  HHS has already defined pregnancy as a disease!

That’s part of the rationale for the HHS Mandate that requires “preventative services” for “targeted diseases.” HHS considers pregnancy a disease so important that it requires the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide sterilizations and abortifacients to prevent somebody else’s pregnancy!

With uterine transplant, along comes a procedure+drug regimen+hospitalization developed in order to cause what the government has elsewhere defined as a dreaded disease.

Will taxpayers be compelled to pay for it?

Somehow, I don’t expect common sense to prevail against the twisted reference-free logic of ObamaCare.

Speaking of twisted logic . . .

Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, the driving force behind the project at the Cleveland Clinic, thinks transplantation is ethically superior to surrogacy. With surrogacy, he told the Times, “you create a class of people who rent their uterus. It possibly exploits poor women.”

And transplantation doesn’t?

One outcome of this research is certain: It may be sooner or it may be later, but this “advance” makes the uterus just one more adult body part that can be harvested and sold.

If the revelations of the past five months have taught us anything, it is to ask more questions about the trafficking of human organs.

Maybe uteruses will be bought and sold on an open market along with human eggs and sperm, the legal sale of which already supplements some student incomes. College students who think they’ll never want a baby might respond to a classified ad if the price is right. The woman who is desperate enough to rent her uterus may be willing to sell it instead.

Or maybe uteruses will be for sale on black markets. Organ harvesting is a tool of political oppression already in countries not known for their respect of human life, born or unborn. I have heard survivors of Chinese prison camps describe the torture they were subjected to, and I shudder to imagine how this might be added to an already vicious catalog of threat.

Worldwide healthcare tourism is a growing industry. Uteruses harvested involuntarily from female prisoners might prove a valuable commodity as more wealthy First World women delay childbearing and need younger uteruses to give them the “experience” they didn’t want when their own organs were capable.

When IVF was first developed, it sounded as much like dystopic science fiction as this does now.  But now it is commonplace, isn’t it?

Attempts at uterine transplants in Saudi Arabia and Turkey have failed so far. But as the technology becomes commonplace, if medically advanced nations fall to ISIS, uterine transplantation might give grim new meaning to the term sex slavery.

But wait. We are only in the first chapter of this. We can relax for now.

At the Cleveland Clinic, only uteruses from dead women will be transplanted. Removing a uterus from a living woman is a seven-to-eleven-hour-long operation, far more complicated than a standard hysterectomy, if the doctors are concerned about the donor’s wellbeing.

Part of the vagina has to be transplanted too, and . . . well, enough said. There seem to be limits to how far the Cleveland Clinic is willing to go today, after all.

But can the rest of the world be trusted to put any limits on this new reproductive technology?

 

See also
From Wesley Smith

*     *     *     *

Connie Marshner is a commentator and researcher on life and family issues in the Washington, D.C., area.

Blog Main Page
Read more!
375 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.

Social Share

  • google-share

One Comment

  1. Ingrid Christensen November 19, 2015 at 8:13 pm Reply

    We are so far down the road with no boundaries except the conviction that we do not need debates about morality.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Comments will not be posted until approved by a moderator in an effort to prevent spam and off-topic responses.

*
*

captcha *

Get the Human Life Review

subscribe to HLR

Recent Posts

Wyoming Bans Abortion Pills

22 Mar 2023

Legal Issues on Chemical Abortions

13 Mar 2023

HHS weighs declaring access to abortion a "public health emergency’

08 Mar 2023

CURRENT ISSUE

Anne Conlon Anne Hendershott B G Carter Brian Caulfield Christopher White Clarke Forsythe Colleen O’Hara Connie Marshner David Mills David Poecking David Quinn Diane Moriarty Dr. Donald DeMarco Edward Mechmann Edward Short Ellen Wilson Fielding Fr. Gerald E. Murray George McKenna Helen Alvaré Jane Sarah Jason Morgan Joe Bissonnette John Grondelski Kathryn Jean Lopez Kristan Hawkins Laura Echevarria Madeline Fry Schultz Maria McFadden Maffucci Mary Meehan Mary Rose Somarriba Meaghan Bond Nat Hentoff Nicholas Frankovich Patrick J. Flood Peter Pavia Rev. George G. Brooks Rev. Paul T. Stallsworth Stephen Vincent Tara Jernigan Ursula Hennessey Victor Lee Austin Vincenzina Santoro W. Ross Blackburn Wesley J. Smith William Murchison

Pages

  • Issues
  • Human Life Foundation Blog
  • About Us
  • Free Trial Issue
  • Contact Us
  • Shop
  • Planned Giving
  • TOPICS
  • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER

Follow Us On Twitter

Tweets by @HumanLifeReview

Find Us On Facebook

Human Life Review/Foundation

Search our Website

Contact Information

The Human Life Foundation, Inc.
The Human Life Review
271 Madison Avenue, Room 1005
New York, New York 10016
(212) 685-5210

Copyright (c) The Human Life Foundation.