Uterus Transplants and the Potential for Harm: Lessons From Commercial Surrogacy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The human uterine transplant (UTx) is being developed as a procedure to alleviate absolute uterine factor infertility (AUFI). In light of recent UTx advances in India, I suggest that key ethical concerns would emerge if this procedure were to become established as part of India's liberalised assisted reproduction industry. On evidence-based projections, UTx would be likely to harm vulnerable populations in two key ways. Firstly, I suggest that a commercial model for uteri procurement is primed to develop due to various structural factors that facilitated the boom in commercial surrogacy remaining in place, despite commercial surrogacy having been outlawed. I outline ways in which Indian commercial surrogacy arrangements exhibited exploitation and suggest that a commercial UTx model would be similarly exploitative, with many background features of exploitative surrogacy remaining constant. The second way in which the development of UTx in India might pose harm is through the difficulty in obtaining proper informed consent, even under altruistic arrangements. I argue that structural factors, including a cultural deference to doctors, lack of medical understanding displayed by vulnerable populations, and a privatised healthcare system with little regulatory oversight, would render it difficult to obtain proper informed consent from living donors. Further, factors peculiar to UTx, such as its experimental nature, and the unknown and novel risks and harms it poses, heighten this difficulty. Accordingly, UTx in India would be unlikely to meet the Montreal criteria for the ethical feasibility of uterine transplantation and should thus raise ethical alarm.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it