South African Man With Penis Transplant Gets Girlfriend Pregnant
If a finger smeared with semen could get a teen Malaysian pregnant, it should not be a surprise that a man who had the first successful penis transplant in the world could impregnate a woman. That’s what happened to a 21-year-old South African man and his girlfriend six months after he got a male genital again.
The man lost his penis to infection because of a circumcision rite gone wrong. It is not just the young man who lost his manhood to botched adult circumcisions, but about 250 other male members of South Africa’s Xhosa ethnic group are forced to have their penises amputated yearly due to poor sanitary circumcision practices, reports Washington Post.
But the transplant was more than just cutting off the phallus from a dead man. Surgeons, led by Professor Andre van der Merwe of Stellenbosch University, had to make a new penis from abdominal skin so that the deceased donor could be buried with a male genital.
Der Merwe announced the girlfriend's pregnancy on Thursday at a public lecture, reports News24. He heads the university’s Division of Urology and led the transplant at Tygerberg Hospital in December 2014. Despite the success, the doctors are still monitoring the man’s progress since they could still operate on him possibly in mid-August for improvements.
The report notes that in the future, there would no longer be a need to harvest the genitals of dead men since there has been positive developments in growing phalluses in laboratories using the cells of the recipient to avoid organ rejection. Fortunately for the young South African, the penis he got was functioning both for urinary and reproductive purposes unlike the case of a Chinese man who was actually the first penis transplant patient in 2006 but had the organ removed after 10 days because he was not satisfied with the appendage’s performance.
Reproductive organ transplant experiments are working not only on the male side but also on the female side. A Congolese woman became pregnant recently after surgeon used tissue from her frozen ovary and transplanted it to her other healthy left ovary a decade after doctors removed her right ovary because she was undergoing chemotherapy for sickle-cell anemia. In 2014, a woman with a transplanted uterus became pregnant and gave birth.
The pregnancy news offers hope not only for Africans whose manhood were damaged by botch circumcision rites but also other men whose member was chopped by jealous wives or girlfriends or are suffering from penile cancer and other ailments on their genitalia.
To contact the writer, email: vittoriohernandez@yahoo.com
