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Sao Paulo, Brazil, Dec 5, 2018 / 05:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Researchers from Brazil announced Tuesday that a baby had been born to a mother who had received a transplanted uterus from a deceased woman.

While uterine transplant is ethical, the use of in-vitro fertilization to produce a child, as was done in this case, is morally illicit.

Though 11 babies have been born worldwide to mothers who received a transplanted uterus from a living donor, this is thought to be the first baby born alive from a uterus taken from a deceased woman.

This follows at least 10 other attempted uterus transplants from deceased donors in the United States, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

The 32-year-old mother, who has a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, was born without a uterus. In September 2016, she underwent uterine transplantation at the Hospital das Clínicas at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

The deceased donor of the uterus, a 45-year-old mother of three, had died of bleeding in her brain.

The mother’s doctors gave her drugs to suppress her immune system so her body would not reject the new uterus. She began to menstruate 37 days after the operation, and after seven months her doctors implanted a single embryo. The doctors had previously removed the mother’s eggs and fertilized them artificially.

The healthy baby girl was born by cesarean section Dec. 15, 2017, near gestational week 36. In the same procedure, the doctors removed the woman’s uterus.

“The results establish proof-of-concept for treating uterine infertility by transplantation from a deceased donor, opening a path to healthy pregnancy for all women with uterine factor infertility, without need of living donors or live donor surgery,” the researchers wrote.

The first successful womb transplant from a living donor raised questions among Catholic bioethicists when it took place in 2014.

Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D., director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA in 2014 that the transplantation of a healthy womb to a woman who lacks a womb because of birth defects or disease can be licit, and “would be analogous to a situation where a kidney fails to function” and a donor provides a healthy organ to someone in need.

Transplanting the uterus alone could be morally acceptable, he said, as long as the transplant of ovaries and sex cells were not also done, respecting the uniqueness of each person’s genetic information.

For such a womb transplant to be completely licit, Pacholczyk said, in-vitro fertilization could not be used, and children would need to be conceived naturally, “through the marital act.”

The use of IVF, as was done in the case of the mother who received the deceased donor’s uterus, violates Catholic teaching because it separates the creation of life from the marital act, Pacholczyk explained.

Despite this, he said the transplant itself opens the possibility for a new morally acceptable therapy, especially since the use of uteri from deceased women does not prevent the donor from being able to bear life while she is still biologically capable of doing so.

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Cali, Colombia, Feb 27, 2018 / 12:44 am (ACI Prensa).- In 2016, Jeison Aristizabal was named CNN’s Hero of the Year for overcoming the challenges posed by cerebral palsy and working to help children with disabilities in Colombia.

Today, Aristizabal, 38, is focusing his efforts on fighting a measure to legalize euthanasia in Colombia.

In October 2017, Colombia’s Constitutional Court instructed the Department of Health to produce within four months regulations for administering “death with dignity” to “boys, girls and adolescents” with disabilities and terminal illness.

The Colombian court said that its ruling seeks to prevent minors from becoming “victims of cruel and inhumane treatment because their right to die with dignity is being denied.”

In response, Aristizabal filed for an injunction with Colombia’s Council of State – the country’s highest judicial authority – to prevent the implementation of the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

Speaking recently to EWTN’s Radio Católica Mundial (Catholic World Radio), Aristizabal said that “people need to know how this happened. This came about because the family of a child with disabilities and a terminal illness saw that their health insurance, their healthcare system, would not provide him with medical care, would not provide medication for their child.”

The child’s family, feeling powerless, told their insurance company that “they would rather see their child die than to see him suffering from negligence, and from the insurance company’s lack of coverage for his medications,” Aristizabal said.

“What the country never expected was that instead of the court saying, ‘We are going to sanction the healthcare system, we are going to order the healthcare system to be more effective,’ what this court did was to order the government to issue regulations on childhood euthanasia.”

“What this court said was that any parent can dispose of the life of his child when he has a terminal illness or a disability.”

Born with cerebral palsy, Aristizabal has faced numerous challenges in life. A doctor told his mother when he was young that he was “not going to amount to anything in this life.”  

But his mother supported him, and today, he is a media professional and lawyer, in addition to running a foundation that serves hundreds of children with disabilities in Cali, Colombia.

Through the foundation, he said, he helps those with physical or cognitive disabilities to realize that they have value and worth.

“Today’s society is one that gives us prognoses,” said Aristizabal, but “you have to overcome that prognosis. We must tell the person who feels defeated today, who has waved the white flag, to not give up.”  

Aristizabal said that he has traveled around the world encouraging people to “not surrender in the face of obstacles.”

“And this is the message that we want to bring to these parents that today are experiencing a tragedy, that today are in a tough situation, [with their children’s] health issues: don’t wave the white flag, don’t give up, don’t accept defeat,” he said.

“Instead rise up today with the will to fight, to win, with the help of God and society.”

Aristizabal has launched a CitizenGo petition drive directed to the Council of State, encouraging it to oppose childhood and adolescent euthanasia.

“Disabilities cannot make children’s human lives of lesser worth because they have such conditions,” he said. “Life is valuable in itself and must be protected.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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Dario Diament/Shutterstock.

ACI Prensa Staff, Jun 28, 2021 / 14:30 pm (CNA).
The bishops of the Pacific and the southwestern regions of Colombia spoke out about the current situation in the country last week, encouraging reconciliation, justice,… […]