Great Britain “has welcomed its first baby born via a transplanted womb” from a deceased donor, reports The Doomslayer.
The Guardian explains:
A baby boy named Hugo is the first child to be born in the UK to a mother with a womb transplant from a dead donor.
Hugo Powell was delivered at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital in London weighing 6lb 13oz, after his mother, Grace Bell, received a transplanted womb from someone who had died.
It is the first birth in the UK using a womb from a deceased donor, with only two previous cases reported in Europe.
Bell, an IT program manager, was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare condition resulting in an underdeveloped or missing womb.
She was told as a teenager she would be unable to carry a child, and has described Hugo’s birth as a ‘miracle’. She said: ‘I never, ever thought that this would be possible. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.’
Bell began fertility treatment several months after the transplant in 2024. Hugo was born in December last year.
Surgeons in Oxford performed Great Britain’s first successful living-donor womb transplant in August 2023, when a 40-year-old woman donated her womb to her 34-year-old sister. As the BBC explained in 2023,
the first uterine transplant in the UK took place earlier this year. The patient was a 34-year-old with a genetic condition called MRKH, which affects 1 in 5,000 women….she was born with ovaries but no Fallopian tubes or uterus.
But her sister was born with ovaries, Fallopian tubes and a uterus, and wanted to donate her uterus to help enable this. She had completed her family, having given birth to two healthy babies….The operation to retrieve the uterus from the donor took 8 hours and 12 minutes, whilst the implantation operation took 9 hours and 20 minutes.
The recipient plans to have two children using the transplanted womb.
