In what is considered a historic first in the UK, a woman has given birth to a baby girl that was carried in a womb that was donated by her sister. Grace Davidson, 36, welcomed her baby daughter Amy on February 27 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London, nearly two years after she received the womb transplant.
Grace, who suffers from Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, a rare condition that left her without a working uterus had long considered alternatives such as surrogacy and adoption before considering the option of a womb transplant. The life-altering surgery was conducted in February 2023 at the Oxford Transplant Centre, under the Oxford University Hospitals foundation.
The womb was gifted by her elder sister, 42-year-old Amy Purdie, a mother of two daughters aged 10 and six. In a statement via the Womb Transplant UK organisation, Grace said, “We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for.” She continued, “I hope in the future this could become a wonderful reality, and offer an extra choice, for women who would otherwise be unable to carry their own child.”
Her husband, Angus Davidson, recalled the tearful moment their daughter was born. “There were people all around us who have assisted us on the way to actually getting Amy,” he said. “We had kind of been staving off emotion, probably for 10 years, and you don’t know how that is going to unravel ugly crying it turns out.”
Professor Richard Smith, the consultant gynaecologist surgeon who jointly leads the UK’s living donor womb transplant program, described Amy’s birth as “the culmination of more than 25 years of research.
Internationally, more than 100 womb transplants have been conducted since the first successful operations commenced in Sweden in 2013, resulting in an estimated 50 healthy births. The case of Grace and Amy is a remarkable milestone in UK reproductive medical history, holding new hope for naturally infertile women.
