Historic birth: Baby girl first born in UK from a womb transplant donated by mum’s sister

A baby girl has become the first in the UK to be born from a womb transplant, after her aunt donated her uterus to her mother, a London hospital said Tuesday.

Amy was born via Caesarean section on February 27 at the Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital two years after her mum, Grace Davidson, received a womb transplant from her older sister.

“We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for,” the new mum said.

“It was quite overwhelming because we’d never really let ourselves imagine what it would be like for her to be here. It was really wonderful.”

She added that she hoped “going forward this could become a wonderful reality, and provide an additional option, for women who would otherwise be unable to carry their own child”.

“The room was full of people who have helped us on the journey to actually having Amy,” her father Angus Davidson said

“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,” he added.

Grace, 36, suffers from a rare condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome and was born without a functioning womb, the hospital said.

She became the first woman in the UK to receive a womb transplant, which was donated by her sister Amy Purdie, 42, who has two daughters, aged 10 and six.

The transplant was performed in February 2023 at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of the Oxford University Hospitals foundation. It took more than 30 medics around 17 hours to remove Amy’s womb and transplant it to Grace.

Prior to surgery the sisters had counselling.

Professor Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecological surgeon who co-leads the UK living donor program, said Amy’s birth was the “culmination of over 25 years of research”.

More than 100 womb transplants have been carried out worldwide since the first ones in Sweden in 2013, and around 50 healthy babies have been born.