In the latest installment of People Playing God, two lesbians in the U.K. have become the first gay couple in the world to carry the same baby in both their wombs without an external incubator.
According to this, Donna and Jasmine used a new in vivo fertilization technology called AneVivo to conceive and then transplant their baby boy, Otis, from one of their uteruses to the other.
“After the egg was incubated, it was taken out of Donna’s womb and then placed into Jasmine’s, making Donna the biological mother, and Jasmine the gestational mother,” Fox 32 Chicago explains.
The procedure, done at the London Women’s Clinic, has been dubbed the “shared motherhood” treatment. The process involved taking an egg from Donna, fertilizing it with donor sperm, placing it back into her body for 18 hours, then removing it and transplanting it into Jasmine for the remainder of the pregnancy. The 18-hour “incubation” process sets the procedure apart from a more typical surrogacy approach.
“You get a lot of same-sex couples where one person is doing the whole thing, and the one person is getting pregnant and giving birth, whereas with this we’re both involved in a massive way,” Donna said. “It’s definitely brought us closer together emotionally. We’re a close couple anyway but we both have a special bond with Otis as well which was helped by the way we’ve done it.”
Otis was born in November.
The new procedure is the latest in a series of medical experiments designed to give same-sex and transgender individuals the ability to conceive biological -- or at least partly biological -- children. Last year, a similar in vitro process was used for a lesbian couple in Texas which allowed both women to carry their baby in their bodies using an incubation device.