A hospital in Ankara Turkey provided many women with a hope for a future that includes motherhood.
Derya Sert is six weeks into a pregnancy. Both she and her baby are healthy, which would not be significant news for a 22-year-old woman, except that Sert was born without a womb.
In 2011, doctors performed the world’s first womb transplant, and with the announcement of the healthy pregnancy the surgery appears to be a success. Sert is pregnant with her own eggs after doctors placed an embryo into her transplanted womb last March.
While the pregnancy is only a few weeks old, the successful birth of the child will provide women who lost their wombs to disease with the option for having their own children, but the long-term scientific potential makes this story even more interesting.
If doctors may implant an embryo into a foreign womb how soon until the female is no longer necessary for a healthy pregnancy? Wealthy people already use surrogates – if pregnancy could be replaced in donated or clone organs in a laboratory wouldn’t a market emerge for children without the nine months of suffering? It certainly would eliminate the issues of surrogate emotional attachment or potential legal pitfalls.
For career minded woman looking to be mothers, sure, bonding with the child during pregnancy is great, but who wants to gain all that weight anyway? That might be a little tongue it cheek, but there are other considerations as well. Pregnancy takes women away from the office, where woman executives have already shattered the glass ceiling and head some of the biggest corporations in the world.
What if you could have children without being pregnant? The question may seem absurd, but expect it to be asked in the near future. True gender equality may be growing in a lab somewhere.
