I've had this discussion with two doctor friends, one of whom is an obstetrician, and the truth is, no matter how good science gets, pregancy is much harder than it looks.

It's not just a matter of a functioning womb (as someone noted above, ectopic pregnancies are typically fatal to the foetus and the mother, so a womb is essential). It's the rest of the body that goes with it - and this includes the endocrine system. Not just progesterone and estrogen, but different kinds of estrogen, and there's strong evidence to suggest that there is a complex feedback system (which includes various glands and even the amygdala) that regulates thyroid activity and helps respond well to other triggers in the blood, releasing various other hormones not related to either androgens or estrogens.

For most XX women pregnancy is the single most stressful and difficult thing they can do with their body. My sister is five years older than I am, but looks at least 10 years older and I'm sure that's the stress of having borne two children. In even normal pregancies there's an increase in stress on the kidneys, the pancreas, the back, the bladder, the breasts, the vascular system, lots of other organs. The complications from pregnancy can include kidney problems, forms of diabetes, blood clots, you name it, and that's before actual childbirth. It's small wonder so many women died before good medical care.

A womb transplant from a donor wouldn't help - the anti-rejection drugs required to accept the transplant would be too problematic to allow a pregnancy even if an ethics committee determined it was okay (which is doubtful given the poor potential outcome for a successful pregnancy). Nobody's going to allow a foetus near a body with those kinds of immune system problems.

As Ray noted above, for an XY person to become pregnant, it's more likely that a 3D printed uterus developed from cells from the patients own stem cells offers the best prospect. But it would need to be accompanied by a more developed vascular network than we can currently generate, and the state of that medical science, while leaps and bounds ahead of where we were ten years ago, is still at least a decade away from sustainable organs with substantial blood vessels. Once we solve the heart and kidneys scientists might get some time to work on a womb. But there's no money in that while surrogacy is legal and more reliable.

Anyway, even if they do solve the womb problem, there is, as I say, the problem of a working fully developed endocrine model. It's likely that any patient would be hospitalised full time for the entire term so that the appropriate hormonal levels could be monitored and adjusted daily.

And, as I say, the ethics problem... Don't expect to see this in a major hospital soon. This is a country that only begrudgingly accepts stem-cell research at all.

But it's nice to dream. Although at 43 I'm too old even if they invented it tomorrow.

they can take a fetus and transplant it into a trans woman's body, birth by caesarian section.

transplanted ovaries and uterus, been done a few times now. 1 cis woman did conceive and give birth, within the last year, because of this.

the stem cell research is promising, but unlikely to be made available any time soon.

doctors are doubtful ANY trans woman could have "natural" childbirth, they doubt that the needed muscles to push the baby out are in place in the trans woman's body.