First baby born in UK after womb transplant

Surgeons are hailing an "astonishing" medical breakthrough as a woman became the first in the UK to give birth after a womb transplant.

- Andrew Gregory

Grace Davidson, 36, who was a teenager when diagnosed with a rare condition that meant she did not have a uterus, said she and her husband, Angus, 37, had been given "the greatest gift we could ever have asked for".

They named their five-week-old girl Amy Isabel - after Grace's sister, Amy Purdie, who donated her own womb during an eight-hour operation in 2023, and the surgeon Isabel Quiroga, who helped perfect the transplant technique.

Davidson said she went into "shock" when she first held her daughter, who was born by planned NHS caesarean section on 27 February at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea hospital in west London. She said: "It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it's just hard to believe."

The couple always had "a quiet hope" the womb transplant would be a success and enable them to start a family. Davidson said: "But it wasn't really until she arrived that the reality of it sunk in."

The development will offer fresh hope to women born without a womb or whose womb fails to function. Three more womb transplants have been carried out in the UK, using deceased donors, with medics hoping the recipients of those wombs will have babies.