Medical Sciences Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals in medical and allied health fields, students of those professions, related academics, and others with a sound understanding of medicine and healthcare-related sciences. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
If you have a medical issue and are unable to carry a baby, can you have the fetus taken out of you and grown in another woman's womb? Or could you freeze it?
I'm thinking of a medical issue like severe chronic pain or cancer that requires significant medical intervention that may harm the baby's growth inside the mother's body.
Currently no, but there is work in progress that will allow extremely premature babies to be grown in artificial uteri. It has so far worked well for baby goats.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/preemies-floating-in-fluid-filled-bags/524181/
Taking a partly developed foetus out of the mother? This is currently not an available method.
However, there are methods out there for the problems you described:
One method allowed in the UK is called a "three-parent baby" and the following guardian article explains it fairly well:
The procedure replaces a small amount of faulty DNA in a mother’s egg with healthy DNA from a second woman, so that the baby would inherit genes from two mothers and one father. The idea is to prevent certain genetic diseases being passed on to children.
[Image Credit: BBC Article] Click Images for full resolution!
Host (or gestational) surrogacy is when IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) is used, either with the eggs of the intended mother, or with donor eggs. The surrogate therefore does not use her own eggs, and is genetically unrelated to the baby. It is physically more complicated and considerably more expensive than straight surrogacy, (although many IPs can have some costs covered by the NHS) and always takes place in a fertility clinic.
Further reading:
No, first you should go throw an IVF process (egg retrieval process and a fertilization by sperm in a lab). Once the embryos are created, after 3 or 5 days they can be transferred to a gestational carrier who will carry the baby until the birth. This process is called gestational surrogacy. In gestational surrogacy, the surrogate is not genetically linked to the baby, as the embryos are created using the intended mother eggs.
There is a second type of surrogacy, it's called traditional surrogacy. In this surrogacy form, the surrogate mother provides her eggs and fertilization is done through a Intrauterine insemination (IUI) process
