‘A miracle baby’: Newborn Hugo rewrites medical history after groundbreaking womb transplant

A tiny baby named Hugo has quietly made medical history in the UK. And yet, at its heart, this isn’t really a story about science. It’s about a mother who finally got to hold the child she once believed she would never have.

Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital. What makes his birth remarkable is how he came into the world. He is the first baby in the country to be born from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor - something that, until recently, sounded closer to science fiction than real life.

He weighed nearly 7lbs at birth. A healthy baby, just like any other. But the road leading to that delivery room was long, emotional, and uncertain.

His mother, Grace Bell, in her 30s, was born without a functioning womb. For most of her life, pregnancy simply wasn’t considered possible. The idea of carrying her own child felt out of reach — something meant for other people.

Then came June 2024. At The Churchill Hospital, doctors performed a complex 10-hour surgery to transplant a donated uterus into her body. The organ came from a deceased donor, someone Grace has never met but now thinks about every single day.

Recovery took time. There were months of waiting, healing, and uncertainty. And then came the next step — IVF treatment, followed by embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic.

So much had to go right. The transplant needed to work. The embryo had to implant. The pregnancy had to hold.

When Grace received the call saying a donor womb was available, she later admitted she was stunned. Excited, yes. But also overwhelmed. After years of imagining motherhood from a distance, suddenly it felt real.

And then Hugo arrived.

She has spoken about waking up after the birth and seeing her baby for the first time — his tiny face, his dummy, the quiet disbelief of the moment. It felt unreal, she said, like she might wake up and find it was only a dream.

While doctors see Hugo’s birth as a huge step forward for medicine, Grace keeps returning to one thought: none of this would exist without the donor and her family. She and her partner, Steve Powell, have called the donation an extraordinary act of generosity. Grace has said she prays the donor’s loved ones find comfort in knowing their loss helped create new life.

Hugo’s birth is part of a UK clinical trial exploring womb transplantation using organs donated after death. The programme plans ten such transplants. Three have already taken place, but Hugo is the first baby born through this specific study.

And interestingly, 2025 has already been a big year for this field in Britain. Earlier, another baby, Amy, became the first child born in the UK after a womb transplant from a living donor — her mother had received the organ from her own sister.

Doctors believe procedures like these could reshape fertility treatment in the future, especially for women born without a uterus or those who lose it due to illness. But standing inside a hospital room, those big medical conversations fade into the background.

Because for Grace, none of this is about history books or headlines.

It’s about something much simpler. Holding her son. Feeling his weight in her arms. And realising that a life she once thought impossible is now sleeping beside her.

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