‘I couldn’t believe I was actually going to hold my own baby’: The first UK woman to have a baby after a womb transplant from a deceased donor tells LUCY ELKINS her incredible story

As Grace Bell felt her newborn son’s tiny head snuggled on her chest for the first time, tears ran down her face: ‘I love you so much,’ she told him. ‘I have been waiting for you for so long.’

Moments earlier, when baby Hugo started crying before he’d even fully emerged during the caesarean delivery, Grace had instinctively reached down to comfort him – and surgeons had to gently push her hands away from the sterile area where they were operating.

Her impatience to meet her son is understandable – as Grace, 32, a senior IT manager, was born without a functioning womb. 

And it’s only thanks to extraordinary advances in medicine that she was able to carry a baby.

When, just after 5pm on December 10 last year, Hugo Richard Norman Powell emerged into the world at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London weighing 6lb 13oz (3.09kg), Grace became the first British woman to give birth after a womb transplant from a deceased donor.

The delivery wasn’t without drama. Hugo’s birth, just under 36 weeks into the pregnancy, came earlier than planned as Grace had developed pre-eclampsia, a sudden onset of high blood pressure which can prove fatal for mother and baby.

Key members of the medical team who needed to be in theatre for the birth in case the transplanted womb needed to be removed urgently had to be scrambled from Glasgow, where they were attending a conference. They made it into theatre with minutes to spare.

Grace, who lives in Kent with her partner of six years, Steve Powell, 37, who works in finance, was oblivious to the mayhem.

‘For me what was taking place felt like some sort of miracle, and after years of wishing for this moment I couldn’t believe I was actually going to hold my own baby,’ says Grace.

‘I didn’t think I could feel as happy as I did that day. And Steve was in shock – he couldn’t believe this was really happening,’ she adds.

‘He’s tried to stay strong for me throughout this and it has not always been easy – at times I have needed a lot of support.’

Grace is only the second woman in the UK to have carried a baby following a womb transplant, the first being Grace Davidson, who gave birth last year after receiving her older sister’s womb.

The two women met by chance while Grace was in the final stages of her pregnancy when she spotted Grace Davidson and baby Amy across the room during a check-up. ‘It was like spotting a celebrity for me, I recognised her from newspaper pictures’, she recalls.

‘It was fantastic to talk to her because no one had been through what I was going through, except for her.’ The women swapped numbers and Grace has been ‘an amazing support’.

But, of course, their experience is different in one key respect: Hugo’s birth was possible only because someone had experienced a dreadful loss.

Grace’s appreciation of their pain is evident. As she talks about this, she doesn’t simply cry, her body is racked with sobs.

‘I think about the donor and her family every day and sometimes it really, really hits me about the pain that they must have gone through,’ she says.

The family of the donor has requested anonymity and Grace knows nothing about the woman. But she knows that the family had to give specific permission for the womb to be donated, as it is not among the organs automatically considered for transplant.

Grace says: ‘I have so many questions that remain unanswered – what sort of person she was and what happened – but I’m so, so grateful that at a time of unimaginable pain, that family made a choice to help others. It is incredible.’

Not everyone supports womb transplants – arguing that although the Womb Transplant UK charity funds the £30,000 operations, unlike most other transplants, they’re not life-saving.

‘But the critics haven’t sat and talked to these women who have no viable womb and whose lives have been torn apart by their longing for a child,’ says Professor Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, who founded Womb Transplant UK and who co-led the transplant operations.

 ‘If you have any compassion you can’t help but understand why we are doing what we do.’ 

Grace herself experienced severe depression as a result of her inability to carry a child, which was at times overwhelming.

It was aged 16, after her periods failed to start, that a scan revealed Grace has Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a condition affecting around 15,000 women in the UK, leaving them with an underdeveloped uterus or without one at all, although they do develop ovaries. She was told then she would never carry a child.

Grace, who comes from a family of three, says: ‘My entire life changed that day. I locked myself in the loo and felt as if the weight of the world came down on me.

‘I did have what they call “remnants” of a womb – two sacs – but they had not fully joined which somehow made it sadder than having no womb at all, as it was so nearly there.

‘Even on good days it would hang over me; the fact that I couldn’t carry a baby was always somewhere in my mind.’

As a teenager, some days even the glimpse of a pram in the street would upset her.

Grace says: ‘Just a Tampax advert could highlight how different I felt to other women some days and bring me to tears.’ Her pain intensified after meeting Steve. Their paths crossed on a train commuting from Kent to their respective jobs in London. One day she plucked up the courage to say hello, and they started dating in 2020.

‘I knew he was the one within a couple of months – and that I was going to have to tell him about my womb,’ says Grace.

By the end of 2020 they’d moved in together and the next year bought a house. But as their relationship developed, Grace felt even more depressed.

‘A lot of friends were having babies,’ she says. ‘Three years ago my sister-in-law became pregnant with my niece and while I was so happy for her and my brother, truthfully, I was also envious.

‘It was hard to watch because, at that time, I had no hope of experiencing pregnancy. I went into a very dark place,’ she says. ‘I hit the lowest point of my life. I would sit and cry in the bedroom for no obvious reason.’

A counsellor with experience of dealing with the grief associated with infertility helped her overcome this and focus on how the couple might achieve a family.

They discussed adoption, but Grace says ‘it’s a very lengthy process’ and, like many, felt the curiosity of wanting to create a life that was genetically theirs.

The only other option was surrogacy. ‘I struggled with the idea of watching someone else carrying my baby for me,’ says Grace.

Nevertheless, in 2023, the couple took their first steps by embarking on IVF and managed to create four healthy embryos.

Grace had put out of her mind the email she had sent to Womb Transplant UK in June 2018 – before she’d even met Steve – after hearing they were looking for women with MRKH who might take part in a research project.

The charity has permission to complete a trial providing womb transplants from five living donors (two of which have taken place) and ten deceased donors (three have been done, including Grace).

It was in October 2023 that Grace got a call out of the blue from the charity, asking if she was still interested. ‘I was speechless, and put the phone down in shock,’ she says. ‘It was also perfect timing as we already had four embryos.’

The next stage was to undergo checks to ensure she was physically and mentally strong enough to withstand lengthy surgery and repeated intrusive tests.

Then the couple needed to create more embryos via IVF (which they paid for themselves) as they had to have five in storage in case the first transfers did not work.

In February 2024, Grace joined the waiting list for a donor and life was put on hold.

She says: ‘We couldn’t leave the country to go on holiday in case a womb became available and I stopped going out for nights with the girls – imagine if the call came and you’d had a few drinks?’

Just four months later Grace was on a video call with colleagues when she got the phone call saying a womb was available. ‘I ran down to tell Steve, shouting: “It’s happening!” I was quite frantic, almost hysterical. Steve was calm as usual – it’s one reason we work so well together.’

They were told to head to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford where all the womb transplants have been performed (a transplant centre, it’s where many of the senior staff involved are based).

‘I was going through a real mixture of emotions,’ says Grace. ‘I was scared, but I was also very excited and also so very sad that I’m in this position only because a woman had just passed away.

‘I remember my dad saying: “I can’t imagine losing you Grace, and that family has gone through the pain,” and it really brought it all home.’

For the medical team it was the start of a punishingly long stint.

Professor Smith and other surgeons travelled across the country to do the three-hour retrieval operation. The donor womb was stored on ice and driven to Oxford.

At 5am the next day the ten‑hour operation to put the womb in place began – with the team connecting four veins and two arteries from the donor womb to Grace’s blood vessels using stitches the width of a human hair. It’s a technically challenging operation, requiring a team of 20 – surgeons, doctors, anaesthetists and nurses.

Grace recalls: ‘I remember waking up in the recovery area and I asked the nurse: “Do I have a uterus?” She said “yes” and I felt this enormous sense of relief.’

Numbed by fentanyl, she initially felt no pain, ‘but I felt unbelievably emotional’, she recalls. ‘Suddenly I had hope.’

She underwent scans and regular biopsies to check all was working as it should.

Two weeks later, sat next to her mum on the sofa, she realised she was having her first period.

‘I said to my mum: “Oh my goodness, I’m bleeding,” ’ says Grace.

‘It took me back to being 16 – but suddenly I wasn’t different to the other girls.’

It wasn’t until six months later, in January last year, that she was healed enough to try the first embryo transfer. Two weeks later – on her birthday – she did a pregnancy test: it hadn’t worked.

After the next attempt in March, Grace was impatient to do a pregnancy test.

‘I was naughty and did the test a day early while Steve was at a Tottenham match,’ she says.

‘When I saw it was positive I was in shock and called my mum because I had to tell someone and I didn’t want to tell Steve in a text message,’ she says. ‘Mum came straight round.’

Grace put the positive test in a box for Steve to open when he got home. He was as blown away by the news as she was ‘and we spent the rest of the day daring to look into the future at what it would be like to be a family’, says Grace.

‘Even though I knew the baby was no bigger than a dot I was already feeling like a mum.’

Looking back now she can’t believe how she managed over the next eight months. ‘It was not a normal pregnancy,’ recalls Grace.

She needed fortnightly scans at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital and fortnightly checks in Oxford – for example, to ensure her dose of anti-rejection medication (she takes 12 pills daily) was right – while also working full-time.

And one of the hardest parts was trying to keep it a secret.

Grace says: ‘Normally at 12 weeks you post it on Instagram and tell all your friends and have the baby shower. But I could not do that.

‘I understand why – the programme wanted to make sure this was a success before I told the world – but it was hard. My immediate family knew and my boss and I told my closest friends, but no one else.’

A scan at 20 weeks revealed they were having a boy. ‘Not that I cared either way what sex baby we were having,’ says Grace.

As the pregnancy reached six months the couple were advised to move from their home to a rental house near the hospital in London so Grace could be closely monitored.

Also, as the womb nerves are not transferred, if she had gone into labour she would not have felt it.

(Moving also meant she was unlikely to bump into anyone who knew about her MRKH and might ask about her baby bump.)

It was always going to be a caesarean delivery because a natural birth would put too much pressure on the transplanted womb.

A few days before the planned delivery date, Grace started feeling ‘quite unwell – really tired’.

Her blood pressure was 150 over 100 – high for her – and the obstetrician told her: ‘I think we have to get him out today,’ she recalls.

She was whisked into theatre, where Steve sat behind her, holding her hand during the two-hour operation.

‘It was longer than a normal caesarean and I started to feel anxious. But then finally I heard Hugo’s first cry and a wave of relief went through me – I burst into tears,’ says Grace.

She cries happy tears now at the memory. ‘Hugo was a little bit purple so he spent the first night in an incubator, which was hard. But the next morning seeing his little face made me well up again.’

Grace had to spend eight days in hospital undergoing checks. ‘I cannot explain how much I wanted to get home and just start life as a family,’ she says.

They made it back just in time for Hugo to spend Christmas Day in his new Santa outfit, being cooed over by the family and with a ‘ridiculous big pile of presents’.

Grace loves motherhood but admits ‘nothing prepares you for the sleepless nights and tiredness’.

The donated womb can stay in place for one more baby, or for five years – after which it will be removed, as being on anti-rejection drugs increases the risk of infections and certain cancers.

Grace hasn’t decided if they will try for another baby. ‘Hugo was more than worth it, but it’s not an easy process – it’s a lot to commit to and the next time I would be doing that with a child,’ she says.

It’s clear she cannot believe her luck to be a mother-of-one.

‘Every year on my birthday, when people told me to make a wish as I blew out my candles, I would wish to have a baby – but part of me thought that’s a wasted wish as it will never come true.

‘But this birthday I didn’t make a wish, because with Hugo here, I couldn’t wish for more.’