Skip to main content

Men Can Be Pregnant and Give Birth

I have remembered watching an old funny movie where a man was about to give birth!!! It was hilarious!!! It was a joke during that time, but the thing is, it will be possible come a time.

One ordinary operation day at Cleveland where a group of surgeon is performing uterus transplant surgery on women who were born without a womb or whose uterus is diseased or malfunctioning. Well, needless to say, that news got us curious, very curious actually and we believe that we all are wondering:  If science can transplant a uterus into a woman, can it transplant one into a man?

YES YES and big YES. Theoretically, men could receive a uterus, carry a baby to term,  and give birth. The revelation, as very surprising as it was, was not the main reason we all are excited about the news, this will happen much sooner than we have expected ;-)

According to Dr. Karine Chung, director of the fertility preservation program at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, “My guess is five, 10 years away, maybe sooner”. Today, medical advances let transgender women adjust their biochemistry to suppress male and introduce female hormones, have breasts that can lactate, and obtain surgically constructed vaginas that include a “neoclitoris,” which allows sensation.

Until now, however, a place to carry the fetus — a womb of its own — was a major missing link. Uterus transplants could conceivably surmount that hurdle.

“I’d bet just about every transgender person who is female will want to do it, if it were covered by insurance,” says Dr. Christine McGinn, a New Hope, Pa., plastic surgeon who performs transgender surgeries on men and women and is a consultant to the new movie The Danish Girl, about one of the first recipients of sex reassignment surgery.

McGinn, a transgender woman and mother of twins, says the “human drive to be a mother for a woman is a very serious thing. Transgender women are no different.”

Uterus transplants are still in the research stage for women suffering from uterine factor infertility (UFI). A Swedish team already has successfully transplanted uteri harvested from live donors and achieved five pregnancies and four live births. In the coming months, the Cleveland Clinic team plans to transplant uteri from deceased donors into UFI female patients.

Transplant surgery is difficult and dangerous, requiring patients to take antirejection drugs throughout their pregnancies, putting them at risk for infection. But for many women — and presumably for many transitioning women — the risk is worth the reward.

However, biological women have a leg up on biological males when it comes to accepting and nurturing a transplanted uterus. Women already have: vasculature needed to feed the uterus with blood, pelvic ligaments designed to support a uterus, a vagina and cervix, and natural hormones that prepare the uterus for implantation and support the pregnancy.

Men have none of those support systems — naturally — but none are impossible to create. “Male and female anatomy is not that different,” says Chung. “Probably at some point, somebody will figure out how to make that work.”

In fact, medical techniques already exist to overcome many obstacles to male pregnancy.

Hormone therapy can shut off testosterone and introduce progesterone and estrogen needed to prepare the uterus for pregnancy.



Even though males do not have uterine veins and arteries needed to nurture the womb, it’s possible to attach a branch of a large vessel, like the internal iliac, to the uterus. “It’s doable, it just hasn’t been done,” Chung says.

Although it’s preferable for a vagina to support the uterus, it’s possible to attach a transplanted uterus to other ligaments in the pelvis.

At the moment, the thorniest problem standing between men and pregnancy is transferring an embryo grown in vitro into the transplanted womb. The usual route for women undergoing fertility treatments is through the vagina and cervix and into the uterus. But since a uterus has never been transplanted into a biological male, techniques to connect a constructed vagina to a transplanted uterus have not been attempted. But Dr. Elliot Jacobs, a Manhattan plastic surgeon, says that theoretically, “Connecting the two is not a major surgical feat.”

Perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle will be the economics: Transplants are wildly expensive, ranging from $25,000 for a corneal transplant to $1.3 million for a heart, according to the National Foundation of Transplants. We can’t even begin to guess how much a uterus transplant will cost if the surgery makes it out of the research phase, and chances are slim that insurance companies will pay for it.

“It’s a class issue; you’ll only have wealthy people able to do this,” says McGinn, who is featured in the documentary TRANS.

Also, transplanting uteri into men provokes ethical questions about long-term health outcomes for transplant recipients and subsequent children, and the benefit to society of using so many resources for men and women to experience the joy of birth.

Well, maybe, nothing is really impossible these days… But before we all go jumping into the band wagon, let’s give this a second thought ;-)

Cheerio!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Most Expensive Philippine Coin Ever Sold

I personally am fond of collecting old coins. I have an ample collection, and decent if I may add, of Philippine old coins. Though I collect coins for a hobby, some people kept on asking me how I acquire those coins and if I’m selling one. So in some cases, when I visit the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines), I always try to order an additional from my own to sell or give it as a gift to my friends. I always wonder, what Philippine coin is the most expensive ever sold, and how much. Priced at $22, 000 or Php 1,038,136.00 as of this writing ($1 = Php 47.19), the 1903 San Francisco Mint fifty centavos is perhaps the most expensive United States-Philippines coin ever sold. Only 2 specimens have reported and only one formally auctioned for the price mentioned. Do not mistake this one for the common 1903 Philadelphia Mint fifty centavos. This coin is an absolute rarity. How this coin surfaced? The story behind that incident is still a myste

The Great Badjang or Giant Taro

As we try to come up with things to do to make our days productive this Pandemic, a lot of people are leaning towards Gardening. Here in the Philippines, people are becoming crazy with a certain plant. It has large leaves which resembles an Elephant’s ear. Badjang, as we call it here in the Philippines, scientifically called Alocasia macrorrhizos, is a species of flowering plant in the arum family that it is native to rainforests of Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Queensland and has long been cultivated here in the Philippines, many Pacific islands, and elsewhere in the tropics. It is also famous as Giant Taro. The giant taro was originally domesticated in the Philippines, but are known from wild specimens to early Austronesians in Taiwan. From the Philippines, they spread outwards to the rest of Island Southeast Asia and eastward to Oceania where it became one of the staple crops of Pacific Islanders. They are one of the four main species of aroids (taros) cultivated by Austron

Hanamichi Sakuragi: In Real Life

I am not that young, though I am not that old to have watched the Manga Series Slum Dunk. A lot of people is being fascinated with the game of basketball. Almost everyone knows how to play the game. Maybe, just maybe, NBA really popularized the sports. Apparently, one story caught my attention, and surely, it is really worth to tell ;-) Slam Dunk (スラムダンク Suramu Danku?) is a sports-themed manga series written by Takehiko Inoue about a basketball team from Shōhoku High School. It was first serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump in Japan from 1990 to 1996 and had also been adapted into an anime series by Toei Animation which had been broadcast worldwide, enjoying much popularity particularly in Japan, several other Asian countries and Europe. Inoue later used basketball as a central theme in two subsequent manga titles: Buzzer Beater and Real. In 2010, Inoue received special commendations from the Japan Basketball Association for helping popularize basketball in Japan.