For the woman who can provide the uterus for a child but not the egg, one answer in the future will be an egg donation. Already the use of the procedure is being explored by scientists in Italy. They call it TDO, the transfer of donor oocytes (eggs). Through a laparoscopy they extract an egg from the ovary of a woman donor. They use another laparoscopy to place the donated egg in the lower part of the fallopian tube of the recipient. The woman who receives the egg can then have sex with her husband or be artificially inseminated with his sperm in the hope that the sperm will fertilize the egg in her body and the pregnancy will develop normally.
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Dr. Cecil Jacobsen of George Washington University Medical School fertilized a chimpanzee egg in vitro with chimpanzee sperm, implanted it in the abdomen of a male chimpanzee, later delivering a healthy baby chimp through a Caesarean section. Australian researchers predict that the technique could be adapted to male humans, leaving open the possibility of surrogate fathers.
