Organ transplants require that the donor have a blood type that is compatible with the recipient.
Why is that not a requirement when you are actually growing the organs themselves during a surrogate pregnancy?
Thanks in advance!
In: Biology
The blood of the baby and the mother never actually interact. The placenta acts as a filter that facilitates the transfer of nutrients/oxygen from the mother and carbon dioxide/waste from the fetus, but the blood of each that transports the nutrients/waste never comes in contact with each other. Organs, in contrast, are directly in contact with the host blood supply, so incompatibility issues are severe.
As a result, babies and mothers can have different blood types – this is fairly common in normal pregnancies (I myself have a different blood type than my mother did).
There are _some_ diseases that can occur if the mothers have different blood types than their babies (particularly Rh factors) but they are uncommon.
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