First Heart Transplant Patient to Have a Baby Is Dead at 24

SAN DIEGO —  Betsy Sneith, a 24-year-old Santee woman who last summer became the first heart transplant recipient to give birth, died Wednesday at the University of California Medical Center here.

Sneith had been taken by helicopter from her home to the hospital after complaining of chest pains.

Cardiologist Dr. Howard Dittrich listed cardiac arrest as the preliminary cause of death. An autopsy was scheduled.

Sneith made international headlines last Sept. 16, when she gave birth to a 7-pound, 1-ounce girl, Sierra Jamieson Sneith, at the University of California, San Diego, Medical Center, four years after receiving the heart of a 23-year-old male traffic accident victim at Stanford University Hospital.

Doctors in Pittsburgh, Pa., found a tumor on Sneith’s heart in 1978. In 1980, doctors said she had only a few months to live without a transplant. Neighbors in her hometown of Plum, Pa., raised $28,000 to help finance the operation.

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

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