U.K. Woman Gives Birth To Healthy Baby After Receiving Womb Transplant

A woman in the U.K. has become the first in the country to give birth after receiving a womb transplant from her sister.

Grace Davidson, 36 gave birth on February 27th to a healthy baby girl via caesarean section at hospital in the U.K. At 19, Davidson was diagnosed with a rare condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, meaning her womb was either missing or not developed properly. The condition affects around 1 in every 4,500 females and often people don’t find out they are affected until their teenage years. External features and genitals are often normal in affected individuals and often people are only diagnosed when they fail to menstruate after puberty.

In early 2023, Davidson received her sister’s womb via a transplant that was documented as successful in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In Davidson’s case, her ovaries were producing eggs despite the lack of functional womb, so prior to the transplant, Davidson and her husband had in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment to create embryos which were frozen, so they could be implanted after the transplant.

“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, who co-leads the UK living donor programme for wombs and is a consultant transplant and endocrine surgeon. “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,” said Quiroga in a press release, who helped pioneer the transplant procedure and was in the operating theatre when Davidson delivered the baby.

Davidson’s sister Amy already had two children before donating her womb and the new baby is named Amy Isabel after both her and Quiroga.

“What a privilege it is to be able to gift something that in many ways I took for granted,” said Amy. “Watching Grace and Angus become parents has been an absolute joy and worth every moment. I feel eternally grateful to be part of their journey.”

The first baby to ever be born from a transplanted womb was in Sweden in 2014, with the boy now being 10 years old. The first U.S. trial for womb transplants in people without viable wombs, either due to a condition like Davidson’s or due to removal e.g. because of cancer, was started in 2017 at UPenn Medicine, with the first baby born to a woman with a transplanted uterus in 2019. There have been an estimated 120 babies born worldwide to mothers with transplanted wombs.