First baby born in UK born after womb transplant and donor aunt's 'ultimate act of love'

Miracle Amy Isabel Davidson is a picture of perfection after making history as the first child in the UK to be born from a womb transplant.

Scientists today hailed the moment of joy after 25 years of painstaking research helped her mum, Grace, 36, defy the odds to . In an astonishing gift of love, she received the uterus from her older sister, Amy, in the UK's first womb transplant in 2023.

Now she has to baby Amy Isabel, named after her aunt and a surgeon who helped perfect the technique. The news gives hope to thousands of women born without a womb or whose womb fails to function.

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Mrs Davidson, an dietitian, and her finance worker husband Angus, 37, are over the moon with their new arrival. Baby Amy was born by planned NHS Caesarean section on February 27 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London.

Mrs Davidson said she felt "shock" when she first held her daughter, adding: "We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for." She added: "It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it's just hard to believe. Our family is just so happy for us. It sort of feels like there's a completeness now where there maybe wasn't before."

Mrs Davidson was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH), a rare condition that affects around one in every 5,000 women. Sufferers have an underdeveloped or missing womb, but functioning ovaries which are intact and able to produce eggs and female hormones. It means conceiving via fertility treatment is still a possibility.

Mrs Davidson was diagnosed when she was just 19 and said was "triggered" by the sight of a mum with a pushchair. Before receiving the donated womb, Mrs Davidson and her husband underwent fertility treatment to create seven embryos, which were frozen for IVF in central London.

Mrs Davidson then had surgery in February 2023 to receive the womb from her sister Amy Purdie, 42, a former primary school teacher, who is mother to two girls aged 10 and six. Several months later, one of the stored embryos was transferred via IVF to Mrs Davidson.

Amy, who weighed 4.5lb, was delivered several weeks early in a planned 90-minute caesarean section, to ensure a safe, hospital-based delivery. The new mum said: "The first couple of weeks were tricky because she was so sleepy, and we were struggling to kind of keep her awake enough for her feed, but she's doing really well.

"She had a bit of jaundice to start with, and she needed a bit of light therapy, but she's a stronger feeder now, and she's more alert. She will kind of wake herself up when she wants a feed, which is nice."

Mr Davidson said the moment his daughter arrived was very emotional. She said: "She came out crying, and we were a bit worried she would be whisked off to an antenatal ward, but she's been with us every minute of her life so we're so grateful for that.

"It had been such a long wait. We'd been intending to have a family somehow since we were married, and we've kind of been on this journey for such a long time. Having waited such a long time, it's kind of odd getting your head around that this is the moment where you are going to meet your daughter.

"The room was full of people who have helped us on the journey to actually having Amy. 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.

"The room was just so full of love and joy and all these people that had a vested interest in Amy for incredible medical and science reasons. But the lines between that and the love for our family and for Amy are very much blurred - it felt like a room full of love.

"The moment we saw her was incredible, and both of us just broke down in emotional tears - it's hard to describe, it was elation." Mrs Davidson said the couple always had "a quiet hope" the womb transplant would be a success. And she said the couple "definitely" wanted to have another child.

"It was quite a long run up to the transplant, maybe eight years or so, and we kept thinking it might get ruled out for various reasons," she said. "But once we had the transplant, I think we were hopeful that things were going to work out. But it wasn't really until she arrived that the reality of it sunk in."

Mrs Purdie, who lives in , was not at the birth but was only a phone call away. She said: "Watching Grace and Angus become parents has been an absolute joy and worth every moment."

Mrs Purdie said she did not hesitate about donating her womb to her younger sister once the living donor transplant programme became a possibility. "It was very natural," Mrs Purdie said. "Because we had followed Grace on the plan of a deceased donor, we had gone on the journey with her.

"And then when she mentioned that there was this opportunity, immediately both me and my older sister, Laura, and our mum - we all said we would do it. There was no question about it."

The medical breakthrough follows 25 years of research by Prof Richard Smith. And it is more than 15 years since he first presented his rabbit study on womb transplants to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Atlanta in the US.

Speaking after Amy's birth, he said: ""I feel great joy actually, unbelievable - 25 years down the line from starting this research, we finally have a baby, little Amy Isabel. Astonishing, really astonishing. There's been a lot of tears shed by all of us in this process - really quite emotional, for sure. It is really something."

Baby Amy was named after Isabel Quiroga, consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of Oxford University and one of the lead surgeons for the transplant. Prof Smith said Amy's birth is proof that womb transplants work.

He said: "So far we've done one living donor transplant, which is baby Amy, and we've done three deceased donor transplants. Those (deceased donor transplant) patients are all well, healthy, and their wombs are functioning normally.

"We certainly hope in future that, of course, they will go on to have babies. At the end of the day, the purpose is not to transplant the uterus, the purpose is to have a baby. And finally, for our living donor, we have proof of purpose.

"When it comes to the deceased donor programme, I would hope that we will absolutely have that proof in the not too distant future, and that should encourage people to look favourably towards this being a properly funded programme, and not dependent upon a charity."

To date, the charity set up by Prof Smith, Womb Transplant UK, has carried out one living donor transplant - on Grace Davidson, baby Amy's mother - and another three on women who received wombs, also known as the uterus, from deceased donors.

The charity has permission in total for 10 deceased donor transplants and five living donor transplants. It is hoped the NHS may provide funding in the future. For the current programme, the charity pays for NHS theatre time and initial care of the patient, but staff do not take payment for their work.

A deceased donor transplant costs £25,000 and a living donor one is £30,000, with the extra £5,000 paying for the surgery to retrieve the organ. The families then pay for their IVF procedures, while the NHS takes over care of the mother and baby once occurs.