First baby girl born in UK from womb transplant

(AFP): 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 on Tuesday.

Amy was born on February 27 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London, 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.

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, told the Press Association news agency.

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

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.

Professor Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecological surgeon who co-leads the UK living donor programme, 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.