Her sacrifice was the most selfless thing I’ve ever known: Couple who have a baby daughter after womb transplant from sister tearfully tell how their dream was fulfilled after 17 years

To the outside world it’s an astonishing medical breakthrough, but to Grace and Angus Davidson the birth of their daughter represents something infinitely more precious – the chance to be a normal family.

Amy Isabel, now five weeks old, is the first baby to be born in this country following a womb transplant – but for the couple, who live in north London, ‘it’s what we always dreamed of’.

The couple beam at each other. Grace, with the baby asleep in her lap, lovingly strokes Amy’s wisps of gingery hair. Her gaze constantly returns to her daughter, as if she can’t quite believe she is really here. There are also many tears.

For to get to this point has required extraordinary strength and determination – including, for Grace, years of intrusive tests, bitter disappointment and frustrating delays – with no guarantee of a happy outcome.

Grace was only 19 when she was told that she had been born without a womb – news that hit her like grief.

‘I felt incomplete. I was broken by it,’ says Grace, 36. ‘Even at that age I felt motherhood was built into me; it was something I knew I wanted to experience.’

After 17 years of chasing this dream – which led to Grace receiving the first ever transplanted womb in the UK – she was so nervous something might go wrong that she didn’t dare consider what it might feel like to finally hold her baby in her arms. 

Then, the evening before her planned caesarean delivery, Grace started shaking uncontrollably as the enormity of what she had been through over nearly two decades hit her.

‘I messaged one of the doctors, who was concerned that it [the shaking] was a medical problem, but I knew it was adrenaline,’ says Grace. ‘Suddenly I was going through a culmination of so many unprocessed feelings – I’d got quite good at blocking out difficult things over the years.’

Amy’s entrance into the world, on February 27, came three weeks earlier than planned as Grace’s cervix started to shorten – a possible sign that labour was imminent. Her medical team decided to proceed with an ‘abundance of caution’, as they wanted to reduce strain on the transplanted womb with a caesarean delivery before Grace went into labour.

A team of 20 doctors, nurses and surgeons stood by in the theatre for the birth (double the number of those present for a ‘normal’ caesarean) in case of complications. The biggest fear was that Grace would bleed from one of the blood vessels that had been painstakingly stitched into place during the nine-hour transplant operation in 2023.

Grace and finance worker Angus, 37, were nervous about how they would react in front of such a large crowd when Amy finally arrived.

They need not have worried, as even the surgeons stitching Grace back up were wiping away tears of joy.

As Angus went to make calls to share the news of Amy’s arrival, there was one person who took priority – Grace’s sister, Amy.

For it was mother of two Amy, 42 – after whom the new baby is named – who’d donated her womb in order to make all of this possible.

‘I was even more overwhelmed than I expected to be,’ Amy says of the moment Angus called from hospital.

Amy, who says she ‘doesn’t like hospitals, needles or blood’, had nonetheless gone through endless tests and eight hours of surgery to have her womb removed for the transplant.

‘It was and always will be the most selfless thing I have ever known anyone to do,’ says Angus.

Indeed, as we talk, Grace is flanked by Angus on one side and her sister on the other, while baby Amy sleeps in her mother’s lap. It becomes clear how much this medical breakthrough owes to a family willing to go to any lengths to help each other out.

It was after a scan to investigate absent periods that Grace was diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare condition affecting around 15,000 women in the UK, which causes the uterus to be underdeveloped or absent, although the ovaries are healthy.

‘It was like going through a loss,’ says Grace. She rarely spoke about her condition with anyone else apart from her parents and three siblings (she has another elder sister and a brother).

‘It was just so painful, I didn’t really want to talk to other people about it. I didn’t want to become upset.’

Her sister, Amy, who still lives in Scotland where the family is from, says: ‘Witnessing Grace’s pain was pretty difficult to watch. We offered to help in any way we could – even surrogacy.’

It was not long after her diagnosis that Grace, then 19, met Angus, a 20-year-old maths undergraduate, when she interviewed him for a job at the pub where she was working part-time in a bid to fund her studies and become a dietitian. Their relationship soon became serious, and Grace felt bound to tell Angus about her condition, not knowing whether he would walk away.

‘I so wanted a family and felt I didn’t want to be depriving someone else of that,’ says Grace. ‘I felt it [my lack of womb] meant I brought less to a relationship.’

Angus remembers ‘feeling so sad for Grace’, but her news changed nothing for him. ‘I knew early on that I wanted to marry her,’ he says.

Just weeks before Grace and Angus’s wedding in 2014, Amy was at her sister’s hen do when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child. (She and her husband have two daughters, now aged seven and nine.) She cries at the memory. ‘Finding out I was pregnant was one of the best moments of my life, but telling Grace I was pregnant was really hard,’ she says.

Grace remained determined that she and Angus would ‘find a way to have a family with any means possible’.

‘Angus was fine with surrogacy, but I found the idea very difficult,’ says Grace. ‘I didn’t like the idea of watching another woman carrying my baby – I wanted the shared experience of it as a couple as well. I wanted us to have a baby together and have that normalcy.’

Grace had been told during her diagnosis that a womb transplant might be a viable option one day, ‘but it seemed like a bit of a pipe dream’, she says.

However, in 2014 a Swedish woman became the first in the world to give birth following a transplant from a live donor, and Grace contacted the researchers working on establishing a UK womb transplant programme to register her interest.

She was delighted when, in 2015, she was accepted to join the waiting list to receive a womb from a deceased donor.

After three years there had been no progress (the team were going through rigorous regulatory processes).

‘I was emailing or calling one of the researchers every three months or so for updates pretending to be light and breezy, but in truth it was all I thought about,’ says Grace.

In 2018, the Womb Transplant UK charity team switched up the plan and decided to use a live donor. Grace’s mother volunteered to donate her womb and, while Grace was nervous about putting her family ‘in harm’s way’, a date was set for surgery and Grace and Angus went through IVF to create seven embryos. The op was cancelled when problems with the womb’s blood vessels were discovered. ‘Mum was pretty devastated when it didn’t work out,’ says Grace.

Grace’s other sister offered to donate her womb even though, then aged 38, she had not had a family herself. But Amy was in ‘no doubt’ the job should fall to her.

‘As a woman and a mother I knew what Grace was missing out on,’ says Amy. ‘But tentatively breaking the news to my husband that I was going to donate my womb to my sister was different.’

It took time for him to come round to the idea. ‘I had just had our second baby, so his focus was on looking out for his family,’ says Amy.

However, he soon agreed, and needle-phobic Amy needed multiple tests to ensure her womb would be suitable.

The process was delayed further when the pandemic hit. Few outside the family were told about what the sisters were going through over those five long years of waiting for the transplant, ‘in case it might encourage pressure or questions too early’, explains Grace. ‘It was strange as it was a big chunk of our lives.’

As soon as the Covid lockdowns were lifted, the plans resumed and the transplant was scheduled for February 12, 2023, in Oxford. The family descended on the city – it was an anxious day for all, including Amy and Grace’s parents. Angus calls it ‘the worst day of [his] life’. Risks included infection, bleeding and damage to other organs.

Amy was the first to be operated on – and Grace spent three hours worrying about her. ‘When I was finally wheeled down I wasn’t so much nervous as overwhelmed. I was thinking, ‘Oh God, oh God’,’ says Grace.

The operations to remove and transplant the womb took an astonishing 17 hours in total. Amy remembers the look of joy on her husband’s face when she came round.

‘I have never seen relief on my husband’s face like it,’ she says. ‘He didn’t look like that even when our kids were born.’

Grace, meanwhile, emerged at around 4am, keen to reassure Angus all was well. ‘I kept saying ‘I’m fine’, and he said ‘You don’t look fine’. I’d been in surgery so long and at such an angle that my face was all swollen.’

Both sisters had to go through painful recoveries. Grace had fluid leaking from the wound, while for the first week Amy was nauseous and at times hallucinating due to powerful painkillers.

‘That’s also when the fear kicked in and I thought ‘I am a mum and I have left my children at home’,’ says Amy. When she finally got home, after spending a week in hospital, her children – who didn’t know about the operation – were shocked to see her in that state.

‘They had never seen me unwell – I didn’t expect them to be so traumatised,’ she says. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know how bad it was going to be. I didn’t go into it with fear.’

Two weeks after the operation, however, the benefits started to become clear.

‘I discovered I was having my first ever period and I remember calling Amy while sitting on the bathroom floor crying,’ says Grace. ‘It felt so special. Finally I felt complete.’

She needed to wait for around a year to heal before she could move to the crucial next step – having an embryo implanted. (A natural conception was not possible as the fallopian tubes are removed during the transplant).

Yet this, too, was put back by months after Grace developed cytomegalovirus, a common infection (which Amy had passed on to Grace via the womb) that could be disastrous if she was carrying a baby. She sorely needed medication to clear it up.

‘I was struggling by then, to be honest, as after all these years I so desperately wanted to get to the point of having a baby.’

The couple finally got the green light to have the embryo implanted in June last year. They had to wait ten days before they could do a pregnancy test.

‘I woke up at 5am to find Grace at the end of the bed clutching the pregnancy test and she asked me to look at the results’, Angus says. ‘I said ‘Pregnant’ and we both just broke down.’

‘Nothing had been normal in this journey, and to be able to sit together on the end of the bed with that positive pregnancy test between us like any normal couple was brilliant,’ says Grace.

Angus cries at the memory of coming back from work later that day ‘with such a spring in [his] step’. ‘I had this urge to run into a pub and shout and tell everyone ‘I’m going to be a dad!’,’ he says.

Grace went to Scotland shortly after to tell Amy and her family the news face to face. ‘I’d tell Amy a bit and she’d cry, and then I’d say a bit more and I would cry,’ she recalls. ‘It was incredibly emotional.’

The pregnancy was closely monitored, with regular scans every one to two weeks. These were needed to check for signs of premature labour which Grace wouldn’t feel, as the womb did not have any connecting nerves.

Grace was relieved to feel the first kick at 20 weeks, as she found much of the early pregnancy ‘nerve-wracking’. ‘I was surprised by how nervous I was,’ she says. ‘I remember after the embryo transfer going on a bike ride and every time I went over a speed bump I worried I might dislodge [the baby].

‘I was starting to really invest in, and care for, this baby and develop all these maternal feelings, and I did worry about how I would cope if something had gone wrong.’

It was at the 21-week scan that they found out they were expecting a girl. ‘If it was a girl we always said we would call her Amy, and we decided on Isabel as a way to recognise our gratitude to the medical team [Isabel Quiroga is the surgeon who co-led the transplant],’ says Grace.

It was not until after 26 weeks of pregnancy that the couple relaxed enough to invest in baby clothes and paint the nursery. Amy even helped them set up the cot.

Grace spent the last trimester ‘bonding with [her] daughter, singing to her, getting her used to [their] voices’. ‘I absolutely loved it, enjoying all those things I thought I might never experience’, she says.

Grace was in hospital for the last week of her pregnancy, before the delivery at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London.

The caesarean took a little longer than usual – one-and-a-half hours compared to the normal half an hour or so – as when surgeons opened Grace’s abdomen they found several large blood vessels in the way. But, when she finally arrived, baby Amy was passed over the drapes to a stunned Grace.

‘I couldn’t quite believe that we had finally made it,’ she says.

Grace savoured the moment, holding her baby to her skin. Exhausted but happy, she was even able to breastfeed that night.

After eight days Grace, baby Amy and Angus made the journey home as a family.

Having been through so much, Grace says: ‘I was conscious that motherhood might be an anti-climax and I thought the baby blues might happen, but so far it has been so lovely. And it’s amazing how you can get by on two or three hours of sleep.’

Grace and Angus are in no doubt that they want to try for a sibling for Amy ‘as soon as possible’ – although they will have to stop at two children. The womb must be removed within five years as the immunosuppression drugs that Grace must take to stop her body rejecting it bring an increased risk of infection and cancer.

The conversation comes to an end as baby Amy stretches her arms above her head and Mum, Dad and Auntie Amy cluck at her in delight.

It’s what Grace and Angus yearned for: a normal family, revelling in normal family things.