A “miracle” baby girl has become the first child in the UK to be born to a mother using a donated womb – from her sister.
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 womb transplant, reports the BBC.
Two years later, Davidson has given birth to her first child, and now she and her husband hope to eventually have a second child using the transplanted womb.
The surgical team said they had carried out three further womb transplants using deceased donors since Davidson’s transplant. They aim to carry out a total of 15 as part of a clinical trial.
Davidson was born with a rare condition, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, where the womb is missing or under-developed, but with functioning ovaries.
When the BBC first spoke to her in 2018, she was hoping her mother could donate her uterus to allow her to have children – but it proved to be unsuitable.
In 2019, one of her two sisters, Amy Purdie, was assessed to find out if she could donate her womb to Davidson. She and her husband already had two children and did not want any more.
Before surgery, both sisters had counselling. The Davidsons also had fertility treatment and still have several embryos in storage.
Originally scheduled for late 2019, the sisters’ transplant operation fell through and then looked in doubt for several years during the Covid pandemic.
When it eventually took place in 2023, it took a team of more than 30 medics around 17 hours to remove Purdie’s womb and transplant it to her sister.
Isabel Quiroga, the surgeon who led the transplant team at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, said although the procedure carried risks for both sisters, it was “life-enhancing and life-creating, and you can’t have better than that”.
Purdie said she did not feel the sense of loss some women experience after a hysterectomy, because of the immediate benefits to her sister. Davidson had her first ever period within two weeks of the transplant and became pregnant on the first attempt at IVF.
The baby was born by Caesarean section on 27 February.
The donated womb will be removed after the birth of a second child, allowing Davidson to stop taking the daily immune-suppressants she is currently on to ensure her body does not reject her sister’s womb. Taking these drugs can increase the risks of developing some cancers, especially if taken over many years, but Quiroga said these risks should return to baseline once the womb is removed.
Professor Richard Smith, a gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare, who led the organ retrieval team, has been researching womb transplantation for more than two decades.
He said the birth will give hope to many of the 15 000 women in the UK of childbearing age who do not have a functioning uterus, of whom around 5 000 were born without a womb.
Smith heads a charity called Womb Transplant UK, which paid the NHS costs for the transplant operation. All of the medical staff gave their time free.
He told the BBC around 10 women have embryos in storage or are undergoing fertility treatment, a requirement for being considered for womb transplantation. Each transplant costs around £30 000, he said, and the charity has sufficient funds to do two more.
The surgical team has permission to perform 15 womb transplants as part of a clinical trial, five with living and 10 with deceased donors. No details have been made public about the three women who have so far received wombs from deceased donor organs.
The first baby born through a womb transplant was in Sweden in 2014, but since then, around 135 such transplants have been carried out in more than a dozen countries, including the US, China, France, Germany, India and Turkey. Around 65 babies have been born.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
First UK womb transplant with donated uterus
Successful birth after womb is transplanted from deceased donor
Landmark application: Man approaches UK High Court in bid to have dead wife’s baby with surrogate