The main issue seems to be how we handle looking in a morrir and seeing someone staring back at us. That might be unnerving, but I think that if my choice was getting used to the horribly disfigured face caused by a dog attack (which is what happened to the woman in the story) or getting used to looking like someone else who was not horribly disfigured that I would choose the operation.
I can see more potential problems for this operation on an adult who was born with some the facial deformities since the person in question will have lived their whole life with the disfigurement. How that person sees him or herself would be more ingrained on their psyche and their identity in such a case and a change could be problematic.
That said, I still don’t know if I’d tell someone who was born with a mangled face that they couldn’t get a surgery because they might not be able to handle it… Until there is evidence that people in such cases cannot handle it, I say we err on the side of helping people live more “normal” lives if they want to try such a step.
Now, if an operation that failed could not be attempted again and a person would be left without a face permanantly, that’s another issue but the article makes it seem that other operations can take place if it weren’t to “take.”
I don’t see how this raises any ethical questions at all. If you’ve had your face chewed off by a dog, you already don’t look like you used to, so what’s the problem? And if you were born with serious facial deformities, how is this substantially different than corrective plastic surgery, except that it sounds like it might be more effective?
IANA a doctor, but since it’s a transplant, she’s going to need immunsupressive drugs, to avoid rejecting her face (please, no jokes), which is a complication a more traditional reconstructive surgeory probably wouldn’t involve. I can’t imagine the stress of knowing that there’s a significant risk that my immune system might attack my own face.