The first woman to have given birth from a transplanted womb has said the reward made the risks of the procedure worthwhile.

The 36-year-old Swede and her partner have named the baby boy Vincent, which means “to win” in Latin. The mother learned at the age of 15 that she was born without a womb – a condition that affects one in 4,500 women. “I was terribly sad when doctors told me I would never carry my own child,” she said.

The woman said that Mats Brannstrom, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Gothenburg University, who led the research, “told us there were no guarantees, but my partner and I, maybe we like to take risks, we thought this was the perfect idea”.

“As soon as I felt this perfect baby boy on my chest, I had tears of happiness and enormous relief,” she said. “I felt like a mother the first time I touched my baby and was amazed that we finally did it. I have always had this large sorrow because I never thought I would be a mother. And now the impossible has become real.”

The woman’s mother had wanted to be a donor but was not a match. Instead, she received her new womb from a 61-year-old family friend, who had previously had two sons.

The donor is now Vincent’s godmother and her children have also come to visit the family. “She is an amazing person and she will always be in our lives,” the mother said. “And she has a very special connection to my son.”

The news emerged on Friday that Vincent had been born prematurely but healthy last month. Brannstrom said the infant was “fantastic”, adding: “But it is even better to see the joy in the parents and how happy he made them.”

Vincent’s parents, both competitive athletes, were convinced the procedure would work despite its experimental nature.

The father said: “It was a pretty tough journey over the years, but we now have the most amazing baby. He is very, very cute, and he doesn’t even scream, he just murmurs.

“He’s no different from any other child, but he will have a good story to tell. One day he can look at the newspaper articles about how he was born and know that he was the first in the world” to be born this way.

The transplant operation last year took 10 hours to complete.

Brannstrom said he was surprised an older uterus was so successful, but that the most important factor seemed to be that the womb was healthy.

The recipient had to take three types of drug to stop her body from rejecting the new organ. About six weeks after the transplant she had her period – a sign that the womb was healthy.

After 12 months, doctors transferred a single embryo created in a lab dish using the woman’s eggs and her husband’s sperm. The woman had three mild rejection episodes, including one during pregnancy, but all were successfully treated.

The research, which was paid for by Swedish charity the Jane and Dan Olsson Foundation, gives hope to researchers in Britain, France, Japan, Turkey and other countries who are planning to try similar operations, but using wombs from women who had just died instead of from living donors.

Two other transplant attempts have been reported elsewhere, but neither resulted in a live birth. The first, carried out in Saudi Arabia in 2000, ended in failure after three months when the uterus became infected and had to removed. The second, performed in Turkey in 2011 using a uterus transplanted from a deceased donor, resulted in pregnancies that miscarried within six weeks. The Swedish couple may try for a second child, but the mother admitted: “All the medicines are wearing on my body and my other organs, so we will have to see how it develops.”