Busy day here, no time to think, for which I am eternally grateful. Ruminating is, my friends, highly overrated. Anyhoo, not sure how I feel about “womb transplants” from mother to daughter. I wouldn’t do it, but that alone probably isn’t quite the logical treatment people are looking for. Read about it, here:
Eva Ottosson, 56, has agreed to take part in a groundbreaking new medical procedure, which if successful could see her donate her uterus to her 25-year-old daughter Sara.
Doctors hope if the transplant is successful Sara, who was born without reproductive organs, could become pregnant and carry a child in the same womb from which she herself was born.
by 
Hmmm. Given the amount of anti-rejection drugs Sara will have to be on for the rest of her life after the transplant, I can’t see how it would be safe to be pregnant. And I imagine any pregnancy would need to be achieved via IVF if Sara does not have working fallopian tubes and ovaries.
What I see as the problem with this is that it is the adults who are being taken into consideration and not the child.
Any child born to this woman has a confused heredity, and who is going to deal with that? is it fair to burden someone with the fact that both mother and grandmother are kind of the same?
In all these reproductive methods, the child is seen as an object to be desired, not as a person with his/her own rights.
I googled Margaret Somerville to see if she had made a statement in relation to this yet, but her quote on the top of the search return sort of said it all:
“We’ve long focused on what the adult wants, and we’ve had adult-centred decision-making in relation to assisted human reproduction,” … “What we’ve got to do is make that decision-making child-centred.”
I don’t think coming from the same womb means you’re siblings if the womb carrier is not the same person, so my primary issue with this is the IVF aspect. If there was no IVF involved, I’m not sure I would have any concrete biological problems (none that have to come to mind anyhow) aside from the fact that the womb donor is essentially sterilizing herself. I can also foresee a black market for wombs just as there are for other organs.
Also I do dislike Sara’s comment that adoption would be a last resort of after trying everything else. I think adoption needs to be repackaged and reworded. It’s full of negative verbiage, like “giving up for adoption”, “adopt if we can’t conceive”. Being “half” adopted myself, I wouldn’t like to think my father decided to adopt me just because he had no other options. I think this is the “child centered” viewpoint Somerville is trying to emphasize to the medical community.