There is a whole new ethics war brewing in the United Kingdom. As the country becomes more accepting to transgender people, they starting to find out that transwomen desire way more than the right to live their lives without harassment as well as basic rights. They are also advocating for the right to the ‘authentic female experience’. For a subgroup of transwomen (women who transition from male to female), the authentic female experience includes the ability to biologically have children; conception, gestation and delivery. But all transwomen are still male by sex and have to stick to a lifetime regimen of oestrogen (a female sex hormone) to ‘maintain’ their transition. Sex reassignment surgery takes care of the organs, but transwomen do not have womb. The same way transmen do not have testicles and in effect become sterile once the sex reassignment surgery occurs.
But doctors have been able to successfully implant wombs into women born without them. And now the doctors of the National Health Services (NHS) in the UK, believe and are pushing for the right to offer transwomen the option of having a womb implanted in them, complete with all its attendant biological functions, so they can carry and give birth to their own children. This option has always been open to transwomen, but the process is so expensive and experimental that it costs millions to undergo. The doctors of the NHS believe that a transwoman not having a womb is a sexual dysfunction, much like PCOS, amenorrhea and endometriosis and as such its treatment should be paid for by the National Health Services insurance schemes.
The NHS has been heavy hit in the last decade by budget cuts to health and insufficient funding and is barely managing to give premium care for already established life-threatening illnesses. Denouncers of this pro-womb argument suggest that wombs are a superficial, untested experiment and that government money, which could be put to good use elsewhere shouldn’t be wasted on giving transwomen the ‘authentic female experience’. We see both sides of the argument and remain neutral.
