In Barstow, California, in 1984, Stephanie Fae Beauclair, or Baby Fae, was born with hypoplastic left-heart syndrome, a fatal defect in which the left side of the heart is underdeveloped.
Babies with the condition were expected to live for about two weeks, and Fae’s mother was given the option of letting her die in a hospital or at home. Dr. Bailey, a pediatric cardiac surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California, had a third option: trying to convince Baby Fae’s mother to allow him to try the experimental baboon-heart transplant.
According to TIME, Bailey’s research included “more than 150 transplants in sheep, goats, and baboons, many of them between species.”
Before Baby Fae, other humans had received animal-heart transplants; the last was in 1977, but none survived longer than 3 days. However, Bailey received permission to perform the transplant on Baby Fae.
Media and Animal rights activists gathered to protest, while Dr. Bailey and the medical staff focused on trying to give the little girl a chance to live.
Against all odds, Baby Fae survived the transplant and had a new, healthy baboon heart, but that lasted only 21 days, and Baby Fae passed away, becoming the longest-living recipient of a cross-species heart.
“We weighed all the pros and cons back and forth and just figured that if we didn’t try, this or some other procedure, we would always wonder if we had given our best shot at giving her life,” Howard, Baby Fae’s father, said.
And her mom Teresa replied to the protests against their decision, saying, “I’ll tell you this—if there had been a human heart available and I had a choice of that or a baboon heart, I would have chosen the heart that was the most compatible with her, whatever one it was. There are a lot of sentimental ways of talking about the heart but it’s just a pump. The soul is not in the heart. The soul of a human is in the brain….How can it be wrong to try to save a little girl’s life?”
Dr. Bailey faced heavy criticism; Loma Linda officials even suggested he wear a bulletproof vest when he delivered a talk about the Baby Fae operation. But he decided to cancel it instead.
At a conference, DR. Bailey told medical officials that he used the heart of a baboon that had a different blood type than the infant girl. “If Baby Fae had the type AB blood group, she would still be alive today,” he said.
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