Household Regulation Prof Weblog

I. Glenn Cohen (Harvard) lately posted to SSRN his article Borrowed Wombs: On Uterus Transplants and the “Proper to Expertise Being pregnant,” The College of Chicago Authorized Discussion board 127 (2022).  Right here is the summary:

In December 2017, it was introduced that the primary beginning from a uterus transplant in America occurred at Baylor College (earlier births had been reported from Sweden). On this case the uterus got here from a dwelling stranger, however in different reported instances the uterus has been donated by a household member (equivalent to a mom or sister). In nonetheless different instances, the uterus has come
from a cadaver, as mentioned under actually life introduced into being and nurtured from loss of life. Sooner or later, it might even be attainable to transplant uteruses on to the male pelvis, permitting trans ladies assigned male at beginning or cisgender males to expertise being pregnant, although the science isn’t but fairly there but.

These transplant elevate a number of fascinating questions: wouldn’t it higher to get wanted uteruses from
the useless relatively than the dwelling? Ought to uterus donors be paid? For deceased donors, is a common authorization (as with kidney donors) adequate, or ought to there be a requirement that authorization be given to this particular organ to be donated? Do non-public or public payers have an obligation to pay for these transplants as they’d kidney or liver transplants, or ought to we take into consideration them extra like infertility remedies and even cosmetic surgery (to make use of a purposefully provocative comparability)? How, if in any respect, does the reply differ if the last word transplant recipient is a person or a trans individual?

This text, a part of a symposium situation, doesn’t purport to resolve all and even most of these questions. Its narrower focus is to match uterus transplants to different methods to attain parenthood, particularly surrogacy and adoption, to judge what sorts of rights claims those that search to make use of uterus transplants are making in opposition to the state and supply some tentative ideas on how these claims ought to be handled. Amongst different issues, I think about the best way more moderen reproductive know-how improvements subtly shift the rights claims at situation from rights to *mimick* what is feasible by way of non-assisted copy to proper to *prolong* such copy. I then talk about two remaining household legislation points with dwelling uterus donors, one associated to intra-familial donation and the opposite to uterus donor anonymity.