Uterine transplantation: a promising surrogate to surrogacy?

Infertility due to the inability of the uterus to carry a pregnancy ranks among the most unresolved issues in reproductive medicine. It affects millions of women worldwide who have congenital or acquired uterine affections, often requiring hysterectomy, and potentially represents a considerable fraction of the general infertile population. Patients suffering from severe uterine infertility are currently compelled to go through gestational surrogacy or adoption; both approaches, unfortunately, deprive them of the maternal experience of pregnancy and birth. Uterine transplantation represents an outstanding, yet complex, perspective to alleviating definitive uterine infertility. In the past decades, a number of scientific experiments conducted both in animals and women, focusing on uterine transplantation, have led to promising results. Collectively, these findings undoubtedly constitute a sound basis to clinically apply uterine transplantation in the near future. This paper is, however, an overview not only of the extent and limitations of accumulated scientific knowledge on uterine transplantation, but also its ethical implications, in an effort to define the actual place of such an approach among the therapeutic arsenal for alleviating infertility.
(© 2011 New York Academy of Sciences.)