Real Talk

Womb Transplants Have Made Progress! First Baby In The UK Born From A Womb Transplant

by Kevyn Gohu
April 21, 2025

After undergoing a womb transplant in 2023, Grace Davidson gave birth to a healthy baby girl

Medicine has taken another step forward in women’s health as Grace Davidson is the first woman in the UK to give birth after receiving a womb transplant. She and her husband’s “quiet hope” had been finally answered when their daughter, Amy Isabel, was born on February 27, 2025. But the realization that the transplant worked had only settled in when her daughter began to thrive.

“It was just hard to believe she was real. I knew she was ours, but it’s just hard to believe,” Grace admits.

To honor the journey, she names her daughter after the two people who made it possible: her sister, who donated her uterus, Amy Purdie, and the surgeon who helped perfect the transplant technique, Isabel Quiroga.

After undergoing a womb transplant in 2023, Grace Davidson gave birth to a healthy baby girl — Source: The Guardian
Photograph: Womb Transplant UK/PA

The Peculiar Cases of Fertility

Fertility has always been an issue that society has solely blamed on women. Old but rare disorders pop out of nowhere, leaving most women in shock that such a thing exists. Such was the case of Grace Davidson, who was diagnosed with the rare Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome — a physiological disorder wherein the uterus or the vagina are underdeveloped but the ovaries are completely working (Morcel, Camborieux, Programme de Recherches sur les Aplasies Müllériennes (PRAM) pram-network. coordination@ univ-rennes1. fr, & Guerrier, 2007; Sultan, Biason-Lauber, and Philibert, 2009; Herlin, Petersen, and Brännström, 2020). For women who wish to have children, that kind of diagnosis is life-changing.

Surrogacy was then thought to be the only solution for the issue, until the idea of a womb transplant was proposed and debated over in the 1960s, and the first modern-day one was attempted in the 2000s (O’Donovan, Williams, and Wilkinson, 2019; Akbari, Ghaemi, and Panahi, 2025). Unfortunately, most of these transplants were cadaver transplants in which most of the donors were usually dead or medically declared “brain dead,” which also affected the success rates of the transplants.

So, live donors were proposed, and it was successful! The first medically successful womb transplant recorded was in Sweden on October 4, 2014. Although the baby boy was born prematurely at 36 weeks, it proved that transplanting a uterus was possible. Like any organ transplant, however, the receiver of the transplant would be subjected to lifelong use of medicines that would suppress the immune system. While it means being more prone to getting sick, it would also mean preventing the body from rejecting the donated organ.

But the birth of Amy Isabel is proof there’s much hope in the field, shares Professor Richard Smith, who was also in the operating room when the little girl was born. Tears were definitely shed during the journey, and to witness all the research’s results gave him unbelievable joy.

“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,” Professor Richard Smith shares.

Womb Transplants: Hope For Women Who Wish For Kids

Filipinos may have a 1 out of 4,500 chance of having Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome. But that doesn’t mean there are other ways for women to lose their ability to bear children. Cancer or uterine fibroids are usually the common causes for the need of a total hysterectomy in the Philippines (Tan & Cristi-Limson, 2011; Rivera and Cole, 2020).

While womb transplants are not common or widely available in the Philippines, the UK has been pushing for the procedure to become more widespread. The surgery currently costs around £25,000, with funding coming from Womb Transplant UK. According to The Guardian, over 100 women have expressed interest in the program, and about 10 women have already applied.

Although we’ve become a bit more open and flexible with the term “motherhood,” the experience of carrying one’s own child is still magical for many. Some even call the ability to carry one’s child to term in the womb the true start of motherhood. But circumstances can rob women of that chance. While adoption and surrogacy will never make any woman or man any less of a parent, the success of womb transplants are proof that infertility may soon become a thing of the past.

References

Akbari, R., Ghaemi, M., & Panahi, Z. (2025). Uterus transplantation: a bibliometric review of six‐decade study from 1960 to 2024. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 104(3), 437-451.

Herlin, M. K., Petersen, M. B., & Brännström, M. (2020). Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome: a comprehensive update. Orphanet journal of rare diseases, 15, 1-16.

Morcel, K., Camborieux, L., Programme de Recherches sur les Aplasies Müllériennes (PRAM) pram-network. coordination@ univ-rennes1. fr, & Guerrier, D. (2007). Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome. Orphanet journal of rare diseases, 2(1), 13.

O’Donovan, L., Williams, N. J., & Wilkinson, S. (2019). Ethical and policy issues raised by uterus transplants. British medical bulletin, 131(1), 19-28.

Sultan, C., Biason-Lauber, A., & Philibert, P. (2009). Mayer–Rokitansky–Kuster–Hauser syndrome: recent clinical and genetic findings. Gynecological Endocrinology, 25(1), 8-11.

Tan, A. G. R., & Cristi-Limson, M.G. Total Laparoscopic Hysterectomy: Experience of the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital from 2011 to 2014.

Rivera, R. U., & Cole, L. M. T. (2020). A ten-year retrospective study on the survival outcomes among post-hysterectomy cervical cancer patients. Philippine Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 44(1), 18-25.