A baby has become the first child in the UK to be born to a mother using a donated uterus.
Grace Davidson, 36, was born without a functioning uterus and received her sister’s womb in 2023 in what was then the UK’s only successful uterus transplant.
She gave birth to her first child in February, and she and her husband, Angus, hope to have a second child using the transplanted uterus.
They named their daughter Amy after Grace’s sister, who donated her uterus.
The surgical team has permission to perform 15 womb transplants as part of a clinical trial: five using living donors and 10 using deceased donors.
Grace was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a condition that results in the underdevelopment or absence of the vagina and uterus.
Grace and Angus also underwent fertility treatment and still have several embryos in storage.
A team of more than 30 medics took approximately 17 hours to remove Amy’s womb and transplant it to Grace.
Grace had her first period just two weeks after the transplant and became pregnant on her first attempt at IVF.
Amy was born by Caesarean section at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in West London in February.
The couple hopes to have another baby, and the donated womb will be removed after the birth of their second child. This will allow Grace to stop taking the daily immunosuppressants she is currently on to ensure her body does not reject her sister’s uterus.
Surgeon Isabel Quiroga led the transplant team at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, while Professor Richard Smith, a gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College London, headed the organ retrieval team.
Mr Smith heads the charity Womb Transplant UK, which covered the NHS costs for Grace’s transplant operation. All the medical staff volunteered their time.
He says this birth will give hope to many of the 15,000 women in the UK of childbearing age who do not have a functioning uterus; around 5,000 of these were born without a womb.
Isabel Quiroga is a consultant surgeon at Oxford who specialises in renal and pancreas transplantation, vascular access, and endocrine surgery. She leads organ retrieval efforts in Oxford, has developed international training programmes and co-founded the UK’s first uterus transplant programme with Richard Smith.
For more, visit https://wombtransplantuk.org/
