The first baby girl from a transplanted uterus is born in the UK

A London hospital has announced that a baby girl has been born in the UK for the first time after her mom received a uterus transplant from girl’s aunt (mom’s own sister).

Amy was born at Queen Charlotte and Chelsea Hospital in London, two years after her mom, Grace Davidson, had her older sister’s uterus transplanted.

“We received the greatest gift we could have ever dreamed of,” the new mom said. She added that she hopes that “in the future, this will be a beautiful reality and provide an additional opportunity for women who otherwise would not be able to carry their own child.”

“We had a huge amount of people helping us along the way to Amy’s birth,” her father Angus Davidson told Press Association. “We lived with hope but suppressed our emotions for probably 10 years and now they have come out in an unexpected way in the form of unrestrained tears,” he added.

Grace Davidson, 36, suffers from a rare condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome and was born without a functioning uterus, the hospital said in a statement.

She became the first woman in the UK to receive a uterus transplant, donated by her sister Amy Purdy, 42, who has two daughters, aged 10 and 6.

The transplant was performed in February 2023 at the Oxford Transplant Center, part of the Oxford University Hospitals Foundation Trust.

Professor Richard Smith, a gynecological surgeon who heads the UK’s living donor program, said Amy’s birth was “the culmination of more than 25 years of research.”

Since the first transplant in Sweden in 2013, more than 100 uterus transplants have been performed worldwide and around 50 healthy babies have been born.

Uterus transplant protocol:

• ovarian stimulation and oocyte harvesting;
• fertilization of eggs with sperm and their freezing;
• donor uterus transplantation;
• recovery of the patient within 1 year;
• thawing and implantation of embryos;
• use of immunosuppressants during pregnancy (to prevent organ rejection);
• pregnancy monitoring and cesarean section;
• removal of the uterus after delivery, discontinuation of immunosuppressants.

Unlike transplantation of other organs, the donor uterus does not last long: it is needed only for carrying and giving birth to a child, so it is removed after this function is fulfilled.