The procedure, performed by Leonard Lee Bailey at Loma Linda University Medical Center, was successful, but Fae died 21 days later of heart failure due to rejection of the transplant.

It was hoped that the transplant could be replaced by an allograft at a later date, before Fae's body began generating isohaemagglutinins, but a suitable donor could not be found in time.

"[4] Though she died within a month, Baby Fae, at the time of her death, had lived two weeks longer than any previous recipient of a non-human heart.

[3] The procedure was subject to a wide ethical and legal debate, but the attention that it generated is thought to have paved the way for Bailey to perform the first successful infant allograft heart transplant a year later.

[5] Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time, said the Baby Fae case was totally within the realm of experimentation and was "an adventure in medical ethics".

Screenwriter Tom Serchio later said that when writing the screenplay, he was thinking less of Baby Fae directly and that it was more about being intrigued by the Paul Simon song and the lyrics that reference her.

In second season of the Netflix original Stranger Things, the Halloween edition of The Hawkins Post has a paragraph entitled "Baby Fae's baboon heart".