The placing of a baboon heart into the chest of little Baby Fae caused indignation in many quarters. For some, who might safely be called eccentric, the concern was animal rights. Pickets outside Loma Linda University Medical Center and elsewhere protested the use of baboons as organ factories. Dr. Leonard Bailey, the chief surgeon, was not impressed. "I am a member of the human species," he said. Human babies come first. It was unapologetic speciesism. He did not even have to resort to sociology, to the argument that in a society that eats beef, wears mink and has for some time been implanting pigs' valves in human hearts, the idea of weighing an animal's life equally against a human baby's is bizarre.
Others were concerned less with the integrity of the donor than with the dignity of the recipient. At first, before Baby Fae's televised smile had beguiled skeptics, the word ghoulish was heard: some sacred barrier between species had been broken, some principle of separateness between man and animal violated. Indeed, it is a blow to man's idea of himself to think that a piece of plastic or animal tissue may occupy the seat of the emotions and perform perfectly well (albeit as a pump). It is biological Galileism, and just as humbling. Nevertheless it is fact. To deny it is sentimentality. And to deny life to a child in order to preserve the fiction of man's biological uniqueness is simple cruelty.
Still others were concerned with the rights of the observing public, and its proxy, the press. For a while, when Baby Fae was doing well, the big issue was made out to be the public's (read: the press's) right to know. There were reiterated complaints about withheld information, vital forms not made public, too few press conferences. It is true that in its first encounter with big-time media Loma Linda proved inept at public relations. But how important can that be? In time the important information will be published and scrutinized in the scientific literature, a more reliable setting for judging this procedure than live television.
Baby Fae brought out defenders of man, beast and press. But who was defending Baby Fae? There was something disturbing—subtly, but profoundly disturbing—about the baboon implant. It has nothing to do with animal rights or the Frankenstein factor or full disclosure. It has to do with means and ends.
It turns out that before placing a baboon heart into the chest of Baby Fae, doctors at Loma Linda had not sought a human heart for transplant. That fact betrays their primary aim: to advance a certain line of research. As much as her life became dear to them, Baby Fae was to be their means.
The end—cross-species transplant research—is undoubtedly worthy. Human transplants offer little hope for solving the general problem of children's dying of defective hearts. There simply are not enough human hearts to go around. Baboons grown in captivity offer, in theory, a plausible solution to the problem. To give Baby Fae a human heart would have advanced the cause of children in general very little. But it might have advanced the cause of this child more than a baboon's heart, which, given the imperfect state of our knowledge, was more likely to be rejected.