1st Recipient of Heart Transplant to Have Baby Dies

A Santee woman who made medical history last summer by becoming the first heart transplant recipient to give birth died Wednesday at UC San Diego Medical Center.

Betsy Sneith, 24, died of cardiac arrest shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday, about two hours after she was taken to the hospital by Life Flight helicopter after complaining of chest pains, according to cardiologist Howard Dittrich. Further details on Sneith’s death will have to await an autopsy report, the physician added.

Sneith made international headlines Sept. 16 when she gave birth to a 7-pound, 1-ounce girl at UCSD Medical Center, four years after receiving the heart of 23-year-old man at Stanford University Hospital. There were no complications in the pregnancy or delivery, and Sneith said shortly after the delivery that her major worry was that her post-transplant medications might harm her child.

“I’m not real religious,” Sneith said in an interview several days after the birth. “I guess I’m more self-confident, and I have a great belief that people can control their own bodies more than they’re aware. I think if you make up your mind that your body won’t reject your heart, it won’t.”

Doctors found a tumor on Sneith’s heart in 1978, shortly after she graduated from high school in Pittsburgh. Two years later, doctors predicted that she had only a few months to live unless a transplant were performed.

In February, 1980, after neighbors in her hometown of Plum, Pa., raised $28,000 to help finance the operation, doctors at Stanford replaced her heart with that of a man who had been killed in a traffic accident.

Some doctors, not at UCSD, had advised her to have an abortion last year for fear that her new heart might not withstand the strains of childbirth, Sneith said. However, the concerns that her “male” heart might not pump blood as effectively during labor as a woman’s heart would proved to be unfounded, UCSD officials said.

Sneith, a computer programmer, was unmarried at the time that she gave birth to her daughter, Sierra Jamieson Sneith, and declined to discuss the child’s father. She named her daughter Sierra, after a mountain flower that she had seen in a book, and selected the middle name in honor of Dr. Stuart Jamieson, one of her Stanford doctors.

Asked last summer how it felt to make medical history, Sneith said, “It’s not important to me. I’m glad I’ve got my baby--that’s what’s important to me.”