Literature Review: Uterus Transplants, Anti-Rejection Meds, and Cleft Palate

Cleft Palate image goes away at 6:19 if you want to skip ahead when you see the incoming cleft palate image text warning at 5:52.Show more

Although in 2021, some kidney transplant recipients were able to be long-term weaned off of anti-rejection medication without rejecting the donor kidneys, this cannot currently work for uterus transplants because the transplants are intended to be short-term to minimize the otherwise healthy woman's exposure to these harmful anti-rejection medication, and to minimize the chance that immune rejection processes will damage the uterus to the point that it cannot sustain a pregnancy. The process of teaching an immune system to not reject an organ appears to only have occurred with kidneys and only after an extended time on these drugs: https://gumc.georgetown.edu/gumc-stories/eliminating-the-need-for-anti-rejection-drugs-for-transplant-recipients/. This alternative, if applied to a uterus, may eventually work to create a self-sustaining uterus capable of sustaining a pregnancy without the use of drugs after a point. Finding out that it works would also require planning to experiment on a human fetus. I cannot fully mentally separate the ethics of the womb transplant itself leading to discontinuation of anti-rejection drugs, and subsequent pregnancy, and knowing that the purpose of the womb transplant is a subsequent pregnancy, so I do question the ethics of ever attempting this.