Connect with us

Published

on

A baby girl has become the first child in the UK to be born from a womb transplant.

Grace Davidson, who received the transplant in 2023, said the birth of her daughter Amy Isabel was the “greatest gift we could ever have asked for”.

The 36-year-old, from north London, received the donated womb from her older sister, Amy.

It was the first time the procedure had taken place in the UK, and the birth will give hope to thousands of women born without a womb – like those with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome – or whose womb fails to function.

EDITORS NOTE IMAGE PIXELATED BY PA PICTURE DESK Handout photo dated 27/02/25 issued by Womb Transplant UK of Grace and Angus Davidson (front) with the hospital team at the birth of baby Amy Isabel Davidson.
Image:
Grace and Angus Davidson with the hospital team at the birth of baby Amy. Pic: Womb Transplant UK/PA

Amy Isabel was named after her aunt, and a surgeon who helped perfect the technique, and was born by planned caesarean section on 27 February at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London.

Mrs Davidson, an NHS dietitian, said she felt “shock” when she first held her daughter, adding: “We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for.

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

“It sort of feels like there’s a completeness now where there maybe wasn’t before.”

Undated handout photo issued by Womb Transplant UK of Grace and Angus Davidson with baby Amy Isabel, and her aunt Amy.
Image:
Aunt Amy Purdie (right) with the happy family. Pic: Womb Transplant UK/PA

Her husband Angus, 37, said: “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.

“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.”

Womb transplantation is on the way to becoming an acceptable, life-giving procedure


Photo of Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

Science and technology editor

@t0mclark3

The birth of Amy Isabel is not just a first for the UK, but an important step towards womb transplantation becoming an established medical procedure.

It was little more than a decade ago that the world’s first baby was born following a womb transplant in Sweden.

And not without eyebrows being raised by some in the world of medical ethics.

Not all womb transplants, whether from a living relative or from a deceased donor, are successful. And not all result in successful or uncomplicated pregnancies.

But the surgical team behind this UK success have achieved a one-for-one: a healthy baby born from the first womb transplant ever performed here.

Amy Isabel joins an estimated 50 other babies and children worldwide now born via a womb transplant.

And she won’t be the last.

Around 100 women in at least 10 countries have undergone the procedure – three transplants have taken place in the UK since Amy’s mother became the first in 2023.

A study of 33 womb transplants in the US found 74% of the transplants remained healthy after a year and 80% of those resulted in a successful birth.

But a womb transplant is unlikely to ever become “routine”.

While the number of eligible women – those lacking a functioning uterus but having healthy ovaries – might number in the low thousands in a country the size of the UK, not all would meet the strict medical criteria needed to maximise the chance of a successful transplant and subsequent birth.

And not all might choose it.

A successful birth following a womb transplant involves three major operations. The first to receive the transplanted womb, a caesarean section to deliver the baby, then a hysterectomy to remove the womb once the recipient mother decides to have no more children.

Given a womb transplant isn’t “life-saving”, ethics guidelines require the procedure to be temporary. The long-term risks of organ rejection, and the drugs needed to prevent it, are considered too great once the womb has served its miraculous function.

Some medical ethicists still question the procedure as a whole, arguing it is unnecessarily risky for both the mother and baby, especially babies are born seriously pre-term and at low birth weight.

However, this latest success, and the increasing number of healthy babies born via the procedure worldwide may change that.

Womb transplantation is on the way to becoming an acceptable, life-giving procedure for women who previously had no hope of carrying a baby of their own.

Mrs Davidson was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser, a rare condition that affects around one in every 5,000 women. It means they have an underdeveloped or missing womb.

EMBARGOED TO 0001 TUESDAY APRIL 8..Undated handout photo issued by Womb Transplant UK of Grace Davidson with baby Amy Isabel, and her aunt Amy (right). Grace Davidson who received a womb in the UK's first womb transplant has given birth to a baby girl. Following the huge success of the procedure, Grace has given birth to baby Amy Isabel, named after her aunt Amy - who donated her womb - and Isabel Quiroga, the surgeon who helped perfect the technique. Amy was born by planned NHS Caesarean section on February 27 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London. Issue date: Tuesday April 8, 2025. PA Photo. See PA story HEALTH Womb. Photo credit should read: Womb Transplant UK/PA Wire ...NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
Image:
Grace with her sister Amy (right) and daughter. Pic: Womb Transplant UK/PA

However, the ovaries are intact and still function to produce eggs and female hormones, making conceiving via fertility treatment a possibility.

Before receiving the donated womb, Mrs Davidson and her husband underwent fertility treatment to create seven embryos, which were frozen for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) in central London.

Mrs Davidson had surgery in February 2023 to receive the womb from her 42-year-old sister Amy Purdie, who is a mother to two girls aged 10 and six.

Read more:
AI could help more women get pregnant via IVF
Fertility patients offered unnecessary treatments – report

Several months later, one of the stored embryos was transferred via IVF to Mrs Davidson.

The baby weighed 4.5lbs and was delivered several weeks early to ensure a safe, hospital-based delivery.

Ms Purdie called the birth of her niece “worth every moment”.

Professor Richard Smith and Isabel Quiroga were the lead surgeons for the womb transplant and both were in the operating theatre when Amy was delivered, with her parents choosing her middle name in honour of Ms Quiroga.

Prof Smith, clinical lead at the charity Womb Transplant UK and consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, told Sky News that being in the operating theatre when Amy was delivered was “really quite remarkable”.

The medic said: “We’ve waited a very, very long time for this, and there’s been quite a lot of tears shed. Ironically the scariest bit of the day for me was when [Amy’s] mum and dad asked me to hold their baby, which was incredible.”

Ms Quiroga, consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, part of Oxford University Hospitals, told Sky News it was “quite a complex procedure” and “the pressure was immense when we did the transplant”.

But she said it was “totally amazing to see all that effort” and it has “been totally worth it”.

Continue Reading

UK

Asylum hotel protests expected to swell this weekend – as Farage unveils ‘mass deportation’ plan

Published

on

By

Asylum hotel protests expected to swell this weekend - as Farage unveils 'mass deportation' plan

A weekend of protests and counter-protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers began last night, with dozens expected today. It comes as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has vowed “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants if his party wins the next general election.

Saturday is set to see more demonstrations across major towns and cities in England, organised under the Abolish Asylum System slogan, with at least 33 planned over the bank holiday weekend.

The protests are expected in Bristol, Exeter, Tamworth, Cannock, Nuneaton, Liverpool, Wakefield, Newcastle, Horley, Canary Wharf, Aberdeen and Perth in Scotland, and Mold in Wales.

Counter-protests – organised by Stand Up To Racism – are also set to be held in Bristol, Cannock, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wakefield, Horley and Long Eaton in Derbyshire.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Govt to appeal migrant hotel ruling

It comes after Friday night saw the first demonstrations of the weekend, including one outside the TLK hotel in Orpington, south London.

Dozens of protesters could be heard shouting “get them out” and “save our children” next to the site, while counter protesters marched to the hotel carrying banners and placards which read: “Refugees welcome, stop the far right.”

The Metropolitan Police said a large cordon was formed between the two groups and the hotel, and later confirmed that no arrests were made.

More on Asylum

Abolish Asylum System protests were also held in Altrincham, Bournemouth, Cheshunt, Chichester, Dudley, Leeds, Canary Wharf, Portsmouth, Rhoose, Rugby, Southampton and Wolverhampton.

Protesters outside the Holiday Inn Central, Ashford, Kent. Pic: PA
Image:
Protesters outside the Holiday Inn Central, Ashford, Kent. Pic: PA

Tensions around the use of the hotels for asylum seekers are at a high after statistics showed there were more than 32,000 asylum seekers currently staying in hotels, marking a rise of 8% during Labour’s first year in office.

Regular protests had been held outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which started after an asylum seeker housed there was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl on 10 July.

In the wake of those protests, Epping Forest District Council sought and won an interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated there – a decision which the government is seeking permission to appeal.

Read more:

Who says what on asylum hotels
18 councils pursuing or considering legal action to block asylum hotels
Migration stats going in the wrong direction
Labour may have walked into political trap over Epping hotel

Police officers separate people taking part in the Stand Up To Racism rally and counter protesters in Orpington. Pic: PA
Image:
Police officers separate people taking part in the Stand Up To Racism rally and counter protesters in Orpington. Pic: PA

Farage vows ‘mass deportations’ if elected

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has told The Times there would be “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants if Reform UK wins the next general election, vowing to remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and other international agreements to facilitate five deportation flights a day.

When asked by the newspaper whether that would include Afghan nationals at risk of torture or death, he said: “I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world.

“Who is our priority? Is it the safety and security of this country and its people? Or are we worrying about everybody else and foreign courts?”

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Asylum hotel closures ‘must be done in ordered way’

Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum Angela Eagle said in response that the Reform UK leader is “simply plucking numbers out of the air, another pie in the sky policy from a party that will say anything for a headline”.

She added: “This Labour government has substantially increased returns with 35,000 people removed from the country in the last year alone, a huge increase on the last government.

“We are getting a grip of the broken asylum system. Making sure those with no right to be here are removed or deported.”

Labour has pledged to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this parliament in 2029.

Conservative MP and shadow home secretary Chris Philp also accused Reform UK of recycling Tory ideas on immigration.

“Nigel Farage previously claimed mass deportations were impossible, and now he says it’s his policy,” he added. “Who knows what he’ll say next.”

Home Office stops Norfolk hotel

It comes after South Norfolk Council said it had been told that the Home Office intends to stop housing asylum seekers at the Park Hotel in the town of Diss – which has also seen demonstrations over the last month.

Protests broke out there after officials said they would send single men to the hotel rather than women and children. The hotel’s operator had warned it would close if the change was implemented.

A Home Office spokesperson said on Friday that “we are not planning to use this site beyond the end of the current contract”.

In response, Conservative council leader Daniel Elmer said: “The Home Office thought it could just impose this change and that we would accept it.

“But there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way, and the decision by the Home Office was just plain wrong.”

He added that while “I welcome the decision, in reality it does mean that the women and children who we fought so hard to protect will now be moved elsewhere, and that is a shame”.

Continue Reading

UK

Labour may have walked into political trap over housing asylum seekers in hotels

Published

on

By

Labour may have walked into political trap over housing asylum seekers in hotels

Has the government just walked into a giant political elephant trap by attempting to reverse the Epping hotel ruling?

Already on the back foot after a judge ordered the Bell Hotel to be emptied of asylum seekers, the Home Office is now being attacked for trying to appeal that decision.

“The government isn’t listening to the public or to the courts,” said Tory shadow home secretary Chris Philp.

The politics is certainly difficult.

Government sources are alive to that fact, even accusing the Tory-led Epping Council of “playing politics” by launching the legal challenge in the first place.

The fact Labour councils are now also considering claims undermines that somewhat.

After all, the party did promise to shut every asylum hotel by the next election.

More on Asylum

Figures out this week showed an increase in the number of migrants in hotels since the Tories left office.

And now, an attempt to keep people in a hotel that’s become a flashpoint for anger.

That’s why ministers are trying to emphasise that closing the Bell Hotel is a matter of when, not if.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

What do migration statistics tell us?

“We’ve made a commitment that we will close all of the asylum hotels by the end of this parliament, but we need to do that in a managed and ordered way”, said the security minister Dan Jarvis.

The immediate problem for the Home Office is the same one that caused hotels to be used in the first place.

There are vanishingly few accommodation options.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Asylum hotel closures ‘must be done in ordered way

Labour has moved away from using old military sites.

That’s despite one RAF base in Essex – which Sir Keir Starmer had promised to close – seeing an increase in the number of migrants being housed.

Back in June, the immigration minister told MPs that medium-sized sites like disused tower blocks, old teacher training colleges or redundant student accommodation could all be used.

Until 2023, regular residential accommodation was relied on.

Read more from Sky News:
Rise in migrants staying in hotels
Town ‘changed’ by immigration
Explainer: Where can migrants stay?

But getting hold of more flats and houses could be practically and politically difficult, given shortages of homes and long council waiting lists.

All of this is why previous legal challenges made by councils have ultimately failed.

The government has a legal duty to house asylum seekers at risk of destitution, so judges have tended to decide that blocking off the hotel option runs the risk of causing ministers to act unlawfully.

So to return to the previous question.

Yes, the government may well have walked into a political trap here.

But it probably had no choice.

Continue Reading

UK

US Justice Department releases Ghislaine Maxwell interview transcript

Published

on

By

US Justice Department releases Ghislaine Maxwell interview transcript

The US Justice Department has released a transcript of an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell – the jailed ex-girlfriend of paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell, who is reported to be keen on a presidential pardon, said in the interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last month that she never saw US President Donald Trump in an “inappropriate setting”.

According to the transcript, Maxwell said: “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody.”

Trump and Epstein at a party together in 1992. Pic: NBC News
Image:
Trump and Epstein at a party together in 1992. Pic: NBC News

Maxwell also recalled knowing about Mr Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.

Maxwell said her father was fond of Mr Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, “because she was also from Czechoslovakia, where my dad was from”.

She was sentenced in the US in June 2022 to 20 years in prison following her conviction on five counts of sex trafficking for luring young girls to massage rooms for Epstein to abuse. She has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.

Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell at a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.

Jeffrey Epstein. File pic: New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP
Image:
Jeffrey Epstein. File pic: New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP

Trump ‘was always very cordial’

His case has generated endless attention and conspiracy theories due to his and Maxwell’s links to famous people like royals, presidents and billionaires, including Mr Trump. No one other than Epstein and Maxwell has been charged with crimes.

Mr Trump knew Epstein socially in the 1990s and early 2000s. During Maxwell’s trial in 2021, Epstein’s longtime pilot, Lawrence Visoski, said Mr Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane several times. Mr Trump has denied flying on the plane.

Maxwell, 63, said in her interview with the Justice Department that she never saw Mr Trump receive a massage.

She told Mr Blanche that Mr Trump “was always very cordial and very kind to me”, adding: “And I just want to say that I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now.”

Read more: All we know about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘friendship’

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
Image:
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

Maxwell denies introducing Epstein to Prince Andrew

Maxwell also denied in the interview that she had ever introduced Prince Andrew to Epstein, and that the Duke of York could not have had sex at her house with Virginia Giuffre.

Ms Giuffre, who died in April, sued the Duke of York for sexual abuse in August 2021, saying Andrew had sex with her when she was 17 and had been trafficked by Epstein.

The duke has repeatedly denied the claims, and he has not been charged with any criminal offences.

In March 2022, it was announced Ms Giuffre and Andrew had reached an out-of-court settlement – believed to include a “substantial donation to Ms Giuffre’s charity in support of victims’ rights”.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

From April: Virginia Giuffre dies by suicide

Maxwell told the Justice Department: “I did not introduce [Epstein] to Prince Andrew or to Sarah Ferguson. That is a flat untruth. I’ll start with that.”

She insisted Epstein and the duke met separately, and said “I think Sarah [Ferguson] is the one that pushed that”, before saying that allegations Andrew had sex with Ms Giuffre were untrue, as she was at her mother’s 80th birthday celebrations in the countryside outside the city.

She then claimed Ms Giuffre’s allegation that she and Andrew had sexual contact in the bathroom of Maxwell’s London flat was not true, as the room was not big enough.

She also claimed that an image of her standing alongside Andrew with his arm around Ms Giuffre’s waist was “literally a fake photo”.

Prince Andrew and Virginia Roberts in 2001. Pic: Shutterstock
Image:
Prince Andrew and Virginia Roberts in 2001. Pic: Shutterstock

The release of the transcript comes after Mr Trump has faced criticism from Republican supporters and Democrats over his Justice Department’s decision not to release further details relating to Epstein, after the now US president promised to do so during the election.

Read more: What you need to know about Trump, Epstein and the MAGA controversy

The Justice Department previously said a review of the Epstein case had found “no incriminating ‘client list'” and “no credible evidence” the jailed financier had blackmailed famous men.

In the transcript of the department’s interview with Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend said that she is not aware of any Epstein ‘client list’.

After her interview in July, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) after she was held at a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, that housed men and women.

The Texas camp houses solely female prisoners, the majority of whom are serving time for non-violent offences and white-collar crimes.

Neither Maxwell’s lawyer nor the BOP gave a reason for the move.

Maxwell’s legal team have maintained that she was wrongly prosecuted and denied a fair trial, and have floated the idea of a pardon from Mr Trump.

Read more from Sky News:
Tour bus crash kills and injures several people
Trump critic has home raided by the FBI

Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: US Department of Justice
Image:
Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: US Department of Justice

The president said earlier this month that “nobody” had asked him about pardoning Maxwell, but insisted that he has “the right to do it”.

Mr Trump said: “I’m allowed to do it, but nobody’s asked me to do it. I know nothing about it. I don’t know anything about the case, but I know I have the right to do it.

“I have the right to give pardons, I’ve given pardons to people before, but nobody’s even asked me to do it.”

Continue Reading

Trending