Justifying Innovation under Structural Risk: Uterus Transplantation in Contemporary Sunni Bioethics

Abstract

Abstract The ethical justification of emerging reproductive technologies requires attention not only to their immediate medical objectives but also to their foreseeable social consequences. Uterus transplantation (UTx) provides a particularly illuminating case within contemporary Sunni bioethics because it extends the permissive principle established through IVF while raising questions about the limits of third-party reproductive involvement. This article reconstructs an influential contemporary Sunni framework for justifying UTx and critically examines its conceptual coherence, particularly its account of legally relevant third-party involvement and necessity. These difficulties provide the basis for the article’s central normative argument: that the justification of emerging biomedical interventions must extend beyond their immediate medical objectives to include their foreseeable interaction with existing social structures. To develop this argument, the article introduces the concept of structural risk and uses it to identify when foreseeable social consequences should become part of the justificatory assessment itself. It further argues that this proposal does not introduce an external normative standard into Sunni jurisprudence but develops an interpretive approach grounded in the doctrine of maṣlaḥa mursala , which already authorizes jurists to consider public welfare where the revealed sources provide no explicit ruling. Although developed through the case of UTx, the proposed framework applies more generally to the ethical justification of emerging interventions introduced into socially constraining environments.