32 C
Kolkata
Friday, June 11, 2021

Scientists Make Male Rat Give Birth | National Review

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp


(Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

Years ago, the late Joseph Fletcher — an anything-goes utilitarian, sometimes called the “patriarch of bioethics” — yearned for a time when men would give birth. He wrote in his 1988 book, The Ethics of Genetic Control:

Transplant or replacement medicine foresees the day, after the automatic rejection of alien tissue is overcome, when a uterus can be implanted in a human male’s body—his abdomen has spaces—and gestation started by artificial fertilization and egg transfer. Hypogonadism could be used to stimulate milk from the man’s rudimentary breasts—men too have mammary glands.  If surgery could not construct a cervical canal the delivery could be effected by a Caesarean section and the male or transsexualized mother could nurse his own baby

What seemed crackers then is promoted now as a matter of human rights as part of the transgender movement and other advocacy agendas for creating new family structures. Indeed, an article a bit ago in the Journal of Medical Ethics opined:

From a justice perspective, there is a moral imperative to ensure equitable access to UTx [uterine transplant]. In this case, arguments against providing UTx to genetically XY [transgender] women for reasons unrelated to safety and efficacy should be assessed carefully to address potential discrimination against genetically XY women as a social group.

Scientists just took a big step toward making that once unthinkable prospect — biological males giving birth — a reality. Rats were subjected to an experiment in which a male was surgically attached to a female so there was shared blood, and then a uterus was transplanted into the male. IVF embryos were implanted in the transplanted uterus, and some of the pups were gestated to a successful Caesarean birth. From “A Rat Model for Male Pregnancy:”

For the first time, a mammalian animal model of male pregnancy was constructed by us. Our research reveals the possibility of normal embryonic development in male mammalian animals, and it may have a profound impact on the research of reproductive biology.

Was this really a legitimate area of scientific inquiry? Was the need to determine whether a male mammal could give birth of such scientific importance to justify treating animals in this way? If not — and with all the problems people have in the world, males giving birth would seem to be a very low-priority item — I can only say that the whole enterprise was utterly grotesque. But these are the times in which we live.

Yes, of course it happened in China, the country where anything goes in biotechnology.





Source link

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp
NEWS EDITOR
Breaking News Exchange is mainly to inform the public about events that are around them and may affect them. Often news is for entertainment purposes too; to provide a distraction of information about other places people are unable to get to or have little influence over. News can make people feel connected too.

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Stay Connected

568FansLike
609FollowersFollow
143SubscribersSubscribe
- Advertisement -

Latest Articles