First British child born from womb transplant

A baby girl has made history as the first child in the UK to be born from a womb transplant.

Grace Davidson, 36, underwent the first such transplant in the UK in 2023, receiving the organ from her older sister Amy.

Two years later, she has become the first woman in the UK to successfully give birth following the procedure.

It is hoped the breakthrough will help women in Britain who are currently unable to give birth because of a rare condition affecting the development of the womb.

The Health Secretary said on Tuesday that the transplant could “possibly” be available on the NHS in the future. 

The baby, named Amy Isabel after her aunt and a surgeon who helped perfect the technique, was born via planned caesarean section on Feb 27 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London.

Mrs Davidson and husband Angus, 37, who live in north London, described the “shock” of holding their daughter for the first time.

“We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for,” Mrs Davidson said. “It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it’s just hard to believe.”

Mrs Davidson, an NHS dietitian, was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH), a rare condition that causes an underdeveloped or missing womb.

The ovaries, however, are intact and still function to produce eggs and female hormones, making conceiving via fertility treatment a possibility.

It affects about one in every 5,000 women, which means about 7,000 in the UK are living with MRKH. Women are born with the condition but many will not be diagnosed until their teenage years.

Before receiving the donated womb, Mrs Davidson and her husband underwent fertility treatment to create seven embryos, which were frozen for IVF.

She then had surgery in February 2023 to receive the womb from her sister Amy Purdie, 42, a former primary school teacher, who is mother to two girls aged 10 and six.

Several months later, one of the stored embryos was transferred via IVF to Mrs Davidson.

Amy, who weighed 4.5lb, was delivered several weeks early in the planned 1.5-hour c-section, to ensure a safe, hospital-based delivery.

Mrs Davidson said: “The first couple of weeks were tricky because she was so sleepy, and we were struggling to keep her awake enough for her feed, but she’s doing really well.

“She had a bit of jaundice to start with, and she needed a bit of light therapy, but she’s a stronger feeder now, and she’s more alert. She will wake herself up when she wants a feed, which is nice.”

Mrs Davidson said it had been an eight-year lead-up to the transplant and they “kept thinking it might get ruled out for various reasons” but maintained hope.

She said: “Lots of womb transplants fail in the first two weeks so even just to get to that point was amazing, and having my first period was really amazing, because it showed it was working.”

The 36-year-old took immunosuppressants during the pregnancy to ensure her body did not reject the womb – but said she had been “lucky” to enjoy an easy pregnancy.

Mr Davidson said after the birth they were “worried she would be whisked off to an antenatal ward, but she’s been with us every minute of her life”.

“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,” he said.

“The room was full of people who have helped us on the journey to actually having Amy.

“We had been kind of suppressing emotion, probably for 10 years, and you don’t know how that’s going to come out – ugly crying it turns out! The room was just so full of love and joy,” he added.

The couple hope to have a second child in the future.

Asked whether the procedure would ever be provided by the NHS, Mr Streeting told Times Radio: “Well quite possibly”.

He said: “I mean, we have fertility treatment available and there are some people in our country and some aspiring parents who are not able to conceive – and that can be a really difficult moment in people’s lives and relationships, and that’s why, you know, novel medical research – IVF, for example – has been game-changing for people who otherwise would not have been able.

“One of the reasons why this week, the Prime Minister announced our new health data research service is we want the UK and the brilliant science we have here to be at the forefront of what will be a really exciting revolution in life sciences and medical technology.

“And that’s why we’re going to marry our brilliant British science with the best of our National Health Service to make sure we’re not just benefiting from that revolution, but we’re actively driving it,” he added.

“If you think about what we did at pace during the pandemic to develop the Covid vaccine – imagine if we did for cancer, what we did for Covid?”

Asked about birth rates, Mr Streeting added: “I’m anxious about the birth rate in this country – it does present long-term demographic challenges for our country, but beyond the hard-headed economics, there is also the joy and love and wonder of parents being able to have children, people being able to have children.”

Donations was ‘very natural’

Mrs Purdie, who lives in Scotland, said the decision to donate her womb to her sister was “very natural” once the living donor transplant programme became a possibility.

“When she mentioned that there was this opportunity, immediately both me and my older sister, Laura, and our mum – we all said we would do it. There was no question about it.”

Mrs Davidson was diagnosed with MRKH when she was 19 and found out about womb transplants at the same time.

She described the diagnosis as “devastating” and said she would be “triggered by seeing a mum with a pushchair” and the “really ordinary stuff” that would take her by surprise.

Mrs Davidson says she hopes women in a similar situation will now have more options going forward.

“Here’s this wonderful baby, and there’s that real desire in me, like an innate desire, to be a mum, to carry my baby and to know them from the earliest moment.

“So, I think just knowing that that is an option… this is huge, when it wasn’t there before.”

The lead surgeons were Prof Richard Smith, the clinical lead at the charity Womb Transplant UK and consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and Isabel Quiroga, consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of Oxford University Hospitals.

Both surgeons were in the operating theatre when Amy was delivered, and her parents chose her middle name in honour of Ms Quiroga.

Prof Smith, who led the development of womb transplants in the UK, shed tears at the birth.

He said: “I feel great joy actually, unbelievable – 25 years down the line from starting this research, we finally have a baby, little Amy Isabel. Astonishing, really astonishing.”

Ms Quiroga said: “For me, it’s total joy, delight. I couldn’t be happier for Angus and Grace, what a wonderful couple.

“It was overwhelming actually, it remains overwhelming. It’s fantastic.”

Womb Transplant UK has carried out four womb transplants in the UK – the first on Mrs Davidson and then three on women who received wombs from deceased donors.

The breakthrough in the procedure was in Sweden in 2014 when the first baby, a boy called Vincent, was born after his 36-year-old mother had a womb transplanted from a close family friend who had said she had completed her family.

Dr Mats Brännström, of Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, forecast at the time that womb transplants could be offered to a much wider group of women who have lost their womb after suffering cancer or other diseases, complications after birth and those who had deformed wombs or have adhesions or scars.

The first baby born using the transplanted womb from a dead woman was in Brazil in 2018.