Stand Reversed on New Heart for Baby Jesse

The dying infant of unwed parents will be considered a candidate for a heart transplant, Loma Linda University Medical Center officials said Thursday, reversing an earlier controversial decision to refuse to consider the child because of his family situation.

The decision came after custody of the baby, named Jesse, was transferred to his paternal grandparents, Loma Linda spokeswoman Anita Rockwell said in a prepared statement.

She said physicians had begun to search for a donor heart but did not know when the infant would be transferred from Los Angeles to Loma Linda.

Earlier Thursday, the grandparents underwent psychological evaluation by the hospital, said Susan Carpenter McMillan of the Right to Life League of Southern California, which has lobbied the hospital on behalf of the family.

Loma Linda’s statement said the transplant committee changed its mind after it was “given additional information regarding Baby Jesse,” but did not refer specifically to the psychological exams.

McMillan and Father Michael Carcerano, a Roman Catholic priest, alleged Tuesday that the hospital had refused to list the baby as a transplant candidate, because doctors believed that his unwed parents would be unable to provide adequate post-surgical care.

The hospital, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, had indicated Wednesday that it was reconsidering the decision. McMillan said a Loma Linda psychiatrist asked her late Wednesday to arrange for Thursday’s psychological evaluation of the paternal grandparents.

She said Jesse’s parents, who requested anonymity for themselves and the baby, were willing to give custody of the infant to either set of grandparents to make Loma Linda doctors relent. The baby was born May 25 in an undisclosed Los Angeles hospital, where he remained Thursday in stable condition, Carcerano said.

“Let him live his life and survive,” the child’s 17-year-old mother pleaded Thursday during a network television appearance.

Loma Linda “is willing to consider the (paternal) grandparents as the primary caretakers of the child in the event a heart transplant would be considered and granted,” Carcerano said.

Loma Linda released a list of the guidelines it uses to select heart transplant patients. The guidelines require that such children have no likelihood of survival with conventional treatment, have no other serious medical problems and that the parents are able “to understand and follow a complex treatment program.”

Loma Linda is the hospital where an infant known as Baby Fae received a transplanted baboon’s heart in 1984 in a controversial and futile attempt to save her life. Baby Fae suffered the same defect as Baby Jesse, a fatal underdevelopment of the left side of the heart.

Three infants since have successfully received human heart transplants at the Seventh-day Adventist hospital. Only two other such transplants had been performed in the world, in 1967 and 1984, and those babies both died.