Womb transplants - now possible with organ donors

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Births resulting from uterus transplants have been happening since 2014, but for all previous children conceived this way, the donor was alive. That, understandably, places severe limits on the availability of the organs. This demonstration, reported in the Lancet – that a uterus can be successfully preserved and transplanted from a deceased person – could relax the supply bottleneck for women otherwise unable to conceive because of uterine problems.

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But uterus transplants also raise complicated questions for feminism. “There is a feminist position that supports the uterus transplant, arguing that it allows women … to be included in an experience that is, for some, central to and defining of femaleness,” wrote body theorist Sharrona Pearl. But, she added, that is part of the problem: “The uterus transplant supports the social norm of pregnancy as fundamental to being a woman.” Uterus transplants imply that the risks of the procedure are worth it, says Pearl, “in order to fulfil women’s alleged biological destiny as carriers of future children”.

This tension is nothing new. Ever since the early discussions of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as IVF in the 1920s, they have split opinion about the implications for gender roles and female choices in particular. The idea promoted then by biologists such as JBS Haldane of gestation in artificial wombs – ectogenesis – was welcomed by progressives as an emancipating technology that would free women from the duties of childbearing and the associated constraints on opportunity.

In the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex, was an enthusiastic advocate of ectogenesis for those reasons, saying that only by being relieved of responsibility for childbearing could women hope for social equality. To Firestone, pregnancy was “barbaric” and tyrannical. Others feared that an artificial womb (which remains beyond the means of today’s technology) would sever the mother-child bond and deprive women of their role. “If that last power is taken and controlled by men,” wrote sociologist Robyn Rowland, “what role is envisaged for women in the new world?”

IVF itself has elicited similar concerns. For all that it offers some women their only chance of pregnancy and childbirth, it can seem too much like the commodification of a woman’s body by a male-dominated techno-elite. In the mid-1980s, the German radical feminist group Rote Zora bombed IVF clinics and stole documents, while the feminist network FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) has long expressed scepticism about assisted reproductive technology from feminist and socialist perspectives.