A paper published in a peer-reviewed medical journal has suggested that biologically male “transgender women” may have an “absolute right to gestate,” according to Wesley J. Smith at National Review.
The paper, titled “Uterus Transplantation and the redefinition of core bioethics precepts,” argues that if uterus transplants become “a mainstream surgical practice for women who could not otherwise experience pregnancy,” then “moral and ethical precepts” must be altered to allow this “life-enhancing” procedure to be offered to transgender women in order to fulfill their “reproductive aspirations.”
Although such a procedure performed on a biological male would be “complicated and risky,” the authors argue that “it is worth bearing in mind that transgender women may deem pregnancy as the final and conclusive stage in the process of reconfiguring their life aspirations according to the gender with which they psychologically identify.”
Transgender ethics are fluid, and when the floodgates open, what was impossible today will be compulsory tomorrow. The new “bioethics” must answer questions like the following, raised in the paper’s abstract: If uterus transplants “becomes mainstream, safe and effective for biological women . . . would there be any morally tenable grounds as to why transgender women should be denied such an opportunity for gestation?”
Jacques Balayla, an obstetrician-gynecologist and clinician scientist at McGill University, has already answered the question, arguing that “there isn’t an ethical reason why they should be denied access to the procedure.”
Women and transgender men, in other words, can “have a similar claim to maternity if we consider them to have equivalent rights to fulfill the reproductive potential of their gender.”
In August, the Daily Mail reported that “Brazilian-British television personality” Jessica Alves (formerly Rodrigo Alves), a transgender woman, had “travelled to Brazil in the hope that she can become the first transgender woman in history to have a womb transplant.”
“I’d like to get pregnant the natural way,” Alves said. “I want to do everything as naturally as possible.”
