The 'corpse' expecting a baby: Pregnant Adriana's braindead and decomposing but doctors won't turn off life-support. Now her family say it's 'torture' in case that's divided the world

Daily Mail​

26-05-2025

In the intensive care unit of a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, lies a patient whose fate has set millions of her fellow Americans at each other's throats.
They're not fighting, however, over 30-year-old Adriana Smith's right to live – but her right to die.
Adriana, a local nurse, was nine weeks pregnant when she went to a hospital back in February seeking treatment for intense headaches. Doctors sent her home with some medication but they didn't conduct a CT scan. The next morning she woke up struggling to breathe and making terrifying gargling sounds.
The hospital discovered she had blood clots in her brain and, after an unsuccessful surgery to relieve the pressure, she was declared brain-dead.
Given she already has a seven-year-old son who will now be left without a mother, the situation for Adriana and her loved ones was already terrible.
However, critics say the situation has turned from tragedy into 'an absolute horror show' after Emory University Hospital – where the nurse previously worked – informed Adriana's family that, although she was legally dead, she was not allowed to die.
The apparent reason, according to the hospital's spokesman, is that it's acting 'in compliance with Georgia's abortion laws'.
As such, the hospital has reportedly demanded Adriana be kept alive on breathing and feeding tubes until specialists have determined the male foetus is sufficiently developed to be delivered – by caesarean section – as a baby boy. That is scheduled to occur in early August.
Removing her from life support until that time, health officials reportedly believe, would violate Georgia's strict anti-abortion laws – which prohibit termination once a foetal heartbeat is detected, typically at around six weeks.
The state's controversial law, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, which was dubbed the 'heartbeat Bill' does contain an exception to save the life of the mother. But that doesn't apply to Adriana Smith, as her life is beyond saving.
Her family say they hadn't made up their minds whether to switch off her life support systems but, at this nightmarish moment, are deeply upset that the decision has been taken out of their hands by faceless bureaucrats.
'This is torture for me,' her distraught mother April Newkirk told local TV station 11Alive. 'I see my daughter breathing by the ventilator but she's not there.'
What's more, she revealed that the baby – who the family have named 'Chance' – has hydrocephalus, or fluid on the brain. Even if he survives the pregnancy (which is increasingly uncertain), he could be born with severe disabilities. 'He may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he's born,' Ms Newkirk said.
'Right now, the journey is for baby Chance to survive. Whatever condition God allows him to come here in, we're going to love him just the same.'
While Georgia's heartbeat law was narrowly passed in 2019, it did not come into effect until three years later after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
Three other states have similar abortion bans that come into force around the six-week mark and 12 states bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
Legal experts are in little doubt what is worrying Adriana's healthcare provider – a part of the Georgia law that gives foetuses legal rights as 'members of the species Homo sapiens'.
If Adriana and the foetus are two patients with separate legal rights, even if the mother dies, the hospital might have a legal obligation to keep the foetus alive.
But doctors anticipate there will be more problems for the child, pointing out life-support systems are not designed for long-term treatment of brain-dead patients. With blood no longer running to the mother's brain, the organ is starting to decompose.
'The chance of there being a healthy newborn at the end of this is very, very small,' said Steven Ralston, the director of the maternal foetal medicine division at George Washington University in Washington DC.
The gruesome medical situation and apparent helplessness of Adriana's family has sparked the ire of the 'pro-choice', pro-abortion lobby, with critics saying the case demonstrates a 'pro-life' philosophy that ends up being anything but humane.
Predictably, some opponents have likened Georgia to Gilead, the fictional America in Margaret Atwood's chilling novel The Handmaid's Tale.
In this dystopian world, much of the US is ruled by a brutal Christian fundamentalist government which – to tackle a severe infertility crisis – forces the few women who can conceive to devote their lives to producing offspring for ruling men.
While drawing an analogy with the book – a popular Democrat pastime in MAGA America – is once again a fairly extreme view, critics are correct in saying the state's leaders should have seen this coming.
Legal experts say the vague way anti-abortion laws are written will naturally make doctors and hospitals worried about facing criminal charges.
And they should have foreseen, too, how the movement (currently gaining ground in the US) to establish so-called 'foetal personhood' – whereby a foetus should have legal rights, including the right to life – would inevitably end up pitting the rights of the mother against those of their unborn child.
Now, keen to avert a public relations crisis that could lose them votes in a key swing state, even some of Georgia's conservatives are fighting back by claiming that Georgia's LIFE law is being misinterpreted.
The state's Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, last week released a statement declaring the law does not require doctors to keep brain-dead patients alive, because turning off the life support 'is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy'.
Others disagree, however, and say the hospital has taken the correct – and humane – course.
'While Adriana can no longer speak for herself, her son's life still matters. Her doctors are doing the right thing by treating him as a unique patient,' said Students for Life of America, a national anti-abortion group which has even launched a campaign to raise money to help Adriana's family.
Georgia state Senator Ed Setzler, who sponsored the state's abortion crackdown, has agreed, saying: 'I think there's a valuable human life that we have an opportunity to save, and I think it's the right thing to save it. To suggest otherwise is to declare the child as being other than human.
'This is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life.'
It's certainly an 'unusual circumstance' but it's actually not the first time an American woman has been kept on life support because of a pregnancy. In 2014, Texan Marlise Munoz collapsed on her kitchen floor when she was 14 weeks pregnant.
The hospital informed her husband and parents that she was brain-dead because of a pulmonary embolism. However, medical staff refused to honour Marlise's previously stated wish not to be kept alive by machines, citing a state law that stopped hospitals from withdrawing or withholding 'life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient'.
Marlise's husband launched a legal battle to get her taken off life support, during which the family revealed the foetus was severely deformed due to oxygen deprivation and the fact it was developing in a brain-dead body. A judge ruled in the husband's favour and Marlise was removed from organ support before the baby was born.
But 2014 was a very different America – less riven by culture wars and a triumphalist Donald Trump who was voted in as President on a wave of anti-abortion sentiment driven by supporters in the so-called 'Bible Belt' states of the South and Midwest.
There's no indication Adriana Smith's ghastly limbo state – neither alive nor entirely dead – is due to end any time soon.