A baby girl has become the first child in the UK to be born from a womb transplant.
Grace Davidson, who received the transplant in 2023, said the birth of her daughter Amy Isabel was the “greatest gift we could ever have asked for”.
The 36-year-old, from north London, received the donated womb from her older sister, Amy.
It was the first time the procedure had taken place in the UK, and the birth will give hope to thousands of women born without a womb – like those with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome – or whose womb fails to function.
Amy Isabel was named after her aunt, and a surgeon who helped perfect the technique, and was born by planned caesarean section on 27 February at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London.
Mrs Davidson, an NHS dietitian, said she felt “shock” when she first held her daughter, adding: “We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for.
“It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it’s just hard to believe.
“It sort of feels like there’s a completeness now where there maybe wasn’t before.”
Her husband Angus, 37, said: “The moment we saw her was incredible, and both of us just broke down in emotional tears – it’s hard to describe, it was elation.
“It had been such a long wait. We’d been intending to have a family somehow since we were married, and we’ve kind of been on this journey for such a long time.”
Science and technology editor
The birth of Amy Isabel is not just a first for the UK, but an important step towards womb transplantation becoming an established medical procedure.
It was little more than a decade ago that the world’s first baby was born following a womb transplant in Sweden.
And not without eyebrows being raised by some in the world of medical ethics.
Not all womb transplants, whether from a living relative or from a deceased donor, are successful. And not all result in successful or uncomplicated pregnancies.
But the surgical team behind this UK success have achieved a one-for-one: a healthy baby born from the first womb transplant ever performed here.
Amy Isabel joins an estimated 50 other babies and children worldwide now born via a womb transplant.
And she won’t be the last.
Around 100 women in at least 10 countries have undergone the procedure – three transplants have taken place in the UK since Amy’s mother became the first in 2023.
A study of 33 womb transplants in the US found 74% of the transplants remained healthy after a year and 80% of those resulted in a successful birth.
But a womb transplant is unlikely to ever become “routine”.
While the number of eligible women – those lacking a functioning uterus but having healthy ovaries – might number in the low thousands in a country the size of the UK, not all would meet the strict medical criteria needed to maximise the chance of a successful transplant and subsequent birth.
And not all might choose it.
A successful birth following a womb transplant involves three major operations. The first to receive the transplanted womb, a caesarean section to deliver the baby, then a hysterectomy to remove the womb once the recipient mother decides to have no more children.
Given a womb transplant isn’t “life-saving”, ethics guidelines require the procedure to be temporary. The long-term risks of organ rejection, and the drugs needed to prevent it, are considered too great once the womb has served its miraculous function.
Some medical ethicists still question the procedure as a whole, arguing it is unnecessarily risky for both the mother and baby, especially if babies are born seriously pre-term and at low birth weight.
However, this latest success, and the increasing number of healthy babies born via the procedure worldwide may change that.
Womb transplantation is on the way to becoming an acceptable, life-giving procedure for women who previously had no hope of carrying a baby of their own.
Mrs Davidson was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser, a rare condition that affects around one in every 5,000 women. It means they have an underdeveloped or missing womb.
However, the ovaries are intact and still function to produce eggs and female hormones, making conceiving via fertility treatment a possibility.
Before receiving the donated womb, Mrs Davidson and her husband underwent fertility treatment to create seven embryos, which were frozen for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) in central London.
Mrs Davidson had surgery in February 2023 to receive the womb from her 42-year-old sister Amy Purdie, who is a mother to two girls aged 10 and six.
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Several months later, one of the stored embryos was transferred via IVF to Mrs Davidson.
The baby weighed 4.5lbs and was delivered several weeks early to ensure a safe, hospital-based delivery.
Ms Purdie called the birth of her niece “worth every moment”.
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Professor Richard Smith and Isabel Quiroga were the lead surgeons for the womb transplant and both were in the operating theatre when Amy was delivered, with her parents choosing her middle name in honour of Ms Quiroga.
Prof Smith, clinical lead at the charity Womb Transplant UK and consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, told Sky News that being in the operating theatre when Amy was delivered was “really quite remarkable”.
The medic said: “We’ve waited a very, very long time for this, and there’s been quite a lot of tears shed. Ironically the scariest bit of the day for me was when [Amy’s] mum and dad asked me to hold their baby, which was incredible.”
Ms Quiroga, consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of Oxford University Hospitals, told Sky News it was “quite a complex procedure” and “the pressure was immense when we did the transplant”.
But she said it was “totally amazing to see all that effort” and it has “been totally worth it”.
