Surgeons are hailing an “astonishing” medical breakthrough as a woman became the first in the UK to give birth after a womb transplant.
Grace Davidson, 36, who was a teenager when diagnosed with a rare condition that meant she did not have a uterus, said she and her husband, Angus, 37, had been given “the greatest gift we could ever have asked for”.
They named their five-week-old girl Amy Isabel – after Grace’s sister, Amy Purdie, who donated her own womb during an eight-hour operation in 2023, and Isabel Quiroga, a surgeon who helped perfect the transplant technique.
Davidson said she felt shocked when she first held her daughter, who was born by planned NHS caesarean section on 27 February at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital in London. She said: “It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it’s just hard to believe.”
The couple always had “a quiet hope” the womb transplant would be a success and enable them to start a family, Davidson said. “But it wasn’t really until she arrived that the reality of it sunk in.”
The development will offer new hope to women born without a womb or whose womb fails to function. Three more womb transplants have been carried out in the UK, using deceased donors, with medics hoping the recipients of those wombs will have babies.
About 10 more women are going through the process of approval for a £25,000 womb transplant in the UK, but hundreds more have expressed an interest in the programme, which is funded by Womb Transplant UK.
The charity has permission for 10 deceased donor transplants and five living donor transplants. It hopes the NHS may provide funding in future.
The arrival of Amy Isabel follows 25 years of pioneering research led by Prof Richard Smith, clinical lead at the charity, who was in the operating theatre with Quiroga when the 2.04kg (4.5lb) baby was delivered.
Smith told PA Media: “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.”
Smith, a consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust, said: “There’s been a lot of tears shed by all of us in this process – really quite emotional, for sure. It is really something.”
Quiroga, a consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of Oxford University hospitals, 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.”
Davidson, an NHS dietitian from north London, was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare condition that affects about one in every 5,000 women, meaning they have an underdeveloped or missing womb. The ovaries remain intact and still function to produce eggs and female hormones, however, making conceiving via fertility treatment a possibility.
Before receiving the donated womb, Davidson and her husband had fertility treatment to create seven embryos, which were frozen for IVF in central London.
She had surgery in February 2023 to receive the womb from Purdie, 42, who has two girls aged 10 and six. Several months later, one of the stored embryos was transferred via IVF to Davidson.
Angus Davidson said the moment his daughter arrived was very emotional. He said: “Having waited such a long time, it’s kind of odd getting your head around that this is the moment where you are going to meet your daughter.
“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 and all these people that had a vested interest in Amy for incredible medical and science reasons. But the lines between that and the love for our family and for Amy are very much blurred – it felt like a room full of love.
“The moment we saw her was incredible, and both of us just broke down in emotional tears.”
Purdie said watching her sister and brother-in-law become parents had been “an absolute joy” and “worth every moment” of what she had been through to donate her womb.
Davidson took immunosuppressants during her pregnancy to ensure her body did not reject her sister’s womb. She said she definitely wanted to have another child.
More than 100 womb transplants have been carried out worldwide, with at least 50 babies thought to have been born as a result.
The first successful birth after a transplant took place in Sweden in 2014, with the baby – Vincent – born to a 36-year-old woman who described him as “perfect”.
