A baby girl has become the first in the UK to be born from a womb transplant, after her aunt donated her uterus to her mother, a London hospital said yesterday.
Amy was born on Feb. 27 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London, two years after her mother, Grace Davidson, received a womb transplant from her elder sister.
“We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for,” the new mother said.
Photo: AP
She added that she hoped “going forward this could become a wonderful reality, and provide an additional option for women who would otherwise be unable to carry their own child.”
“The room was full of people who have helped us on the journey to actually having Amy,” said her father, Angus Davidson. “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.”
Grace Davidson, 36, suffers from a rare condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome and was born without a functioning womb, the hospital said in a statement.
She became the first woman in the UK to receive a womb transplant, which was donated by her sister, Amy Purdie, 42, who has two daughters, aged 10 and six.
The transplant was performed in February 2023 at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of the Oxford University Hospitals foundation.
Richard Smith, a consultant gynecological surgeon who jointly leads the UK’s living donor program, said Amy’s birth was the “culmination of over 25 years of research.”
More than 100 womb transplants have been carried out worldwide since the first ones in Sweden in 2013 and about 50 healthy babies have been born.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The