UK woman delivers healthy baby after womb transplant

Grace Davidson, a 36-year-old dietitian from North London, was born with Mayer-Rokitanksy-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare condition that causes a person's womb to be missing or underdeveloped. The condition affects around one in 4,500 women, and people are often unaware of their conditions until their teenage years.

In 2023, Davidson became the first person in the United Kingdom to receive a womb transplant. Davidson's sister, Amy Purdie, donated her womb after she'd already had two children. Although Davidson did not have a functional womb, her ovaries produced eggs, and she and her husband underwent in vitro fertilization to create embryos that could be implanted after her transplant.

In February, Davidson gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Amy Isabel, who Davidson named after both her sister and the surgeon who led her transplant team. Davidson is the first person in the United Kingdom to give birth to a healthy baby after receiving a womb transplant.

"It was quite overwhelming because we'd never really let ourselves imagine what it would be like for her to be here," Davidson said. "It was really wonderful."

Richard Smith, a gynecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare who led the organ retrieval team and has researched womb transplantation for over 20 years, said Davidson's experience was "astonishing and incredibly moving."

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

"Transplants are usually carried out in order to save a life. With this transplant we have been able to enhance a life, and now to create a life," said Isabel Quiroga, a consultant transplant and endocrine surgeon at Oxford Transplant Centre who led Davidson's transplant team. "This is a procedure that will give hope to many women without a functioning womb who thought they might not be able to get pregnant."

According to Davidson and her husband, they hope to have a second child as soon as doctors tell them the time is right. After the birth of a second child, the donated womb will be removed, which will allow Davidson to stop taking daily immunosuppressants to ensure her body doesn't reject the transplanted organ. 

In the United Kingdom, Womb Transplant UK, a charity headed by Smith from Imperial College Healthcare, is helping other women receive womb transplants. The charity covers all hospital fees for the transplants and all medical staff give their time for free. 

The charity's surgical team has permission to perform 15 womb transplants as part of a clinical trial. Of these transplants, five would be with living donors, and 10 would be with deceased donors. So far, 10 women are seeking approval to get a womb transplant, and hundreds more have expressed an interest in the program.

Currently, the charity has enough funding to cover two more transplants, which can cost around £30,000 each. In the future, the charity hopes that the U.K.'s National Health Service will provide funding for the transplants.

Although research suggests womb transplants can be risky and that there is a relatively high rate of early failure, the UK transplant program has been highly successful so far.

"We so far have been very fortunate, and we have 100% survival of the transplants, they're all functioning," Quiroga said. "… I think it's a testament to the strength of our team, the strength of the skill mix that we have, plus the extended group of professionals that are supporting this transplant [program]."