People Are Absolutely Outraged Over A Black Woman In Georgia Being Forced To Carry A Pregnancy To Term — Even Though She Is Legally Dead

Yahoo

3 days ago

Note: This article contains mention of medical abuse and loss of life, including that of an infant.
Adriana Smith is a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother in Georgia. She was about nine weeks pregnant with a boy in February when her boyfriend woke up to her gasping for air in her sleep and gurgling.
Her mother told the media that her daughter had sought treatment at Northside Hospital the previous night and was released after being administered medication, but no CT scans or other tests.
Smith was taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta "with severe head pains," according to MSNBC. "A CT scan showed blood clots in her brain, and soon physicians declared Smith to be brain-dead." She has now been on life support for over 90 days.
The murky legality around this centers on Georgia's LIFE Act, a law banning most abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy once "fetal cardiac activity can be detected" — aka Georgia's heartbeat law. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in 2019, but it was only invoked once Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022.
Officials seem to be in disagreement about the interpretation of the law, though. The office of the Georgia Attorney General issued a statement reading, "There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death. Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy." However, Ed Setzler, a Republican state senator who sponsored the 2019 bill, said he thinks it's "completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child [...] I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately."
Medical staff at Emory, where Adriana Smith worked, have been ignoring the wishes of her family in favor of the law, which leaves a glaring gray area in the case of a legally dead mother.
Brain death is "the legal and medical standard for death in the United States."
Smith's mother and family have expressed that they've had virtually no say in her medical care or that of her fetus. "She's been breathing through machines for more than 90 days," her mother said. "It's torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she's not there. And her son — I bring him to see her."
The family has reportedly been by her side every day since she was admitted to the hospital. Smith's young son reportedly thinks his mother is just sleeping.
According to Atlanta television station WXIA-TV, "The plan now is to keep Smith alive until doctors believe the baby can survive outside the womb — likely at 32 weeks gestation." That would mean 10 more weeks on life support; Smith's family said doctors have told them there are no other legal ways to proceed. "This decision should've been left to us. Now we're left wondering what kind of life he'll have — and we're going to be the ones raising him," Smith's mother said.
She told WXIA-TV that the family is concerned about the health of Smith's baby, as doctors have told them he has fluid on the brain. "[Adriana] is pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he's born," Smith's mother said.
Many people have taken to social media to express their outrage over the anti-abortion legal and medical system that has allowed Adriana Smith to be kept alive by machines for the sake of preserving her pregnancy.
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"I'm the mother of a brain-dead son whose organs were donated," said TikTok user Jennifer Comstock (@positivejen) in a video earlier this week. "People need to understand what it's like to keep a brain-dead body alive." She goes on to explain that it took time for the hospital to stabilize and prepare his organs for donation and to find suitable recipients because of his blood type.
"So I sat in that hospital bed with him for two days, because despite the fact that he was legally dead, that was my baby, and I wasn't leaving him in that hospital alone," she says.
"During that two days, the amount of interventions they had to do to keep my son's body was unbelievable," Comstock says. "Obviously, he was on a ventilator, but you also can't regulate your own heartbeat. You can't maintain your own blood pressure. They're giving you all kinds of medications [...] His kidneys were failing. They had to give him medication to fix that."
She goes on: "They would fix one thing, and another thing would go wrong. And sitting there watching it felt wrong. It was horrible watching what they were doing to him."
But, as Comstock says, there's one major difference between the case of her 30-year-old son and that of Adriana Smith: "My son wanted to be an organ donor, and that is why we continued to do it. And my son saved lives," she said. "But I don't think you guys understand. This woman is not in a vegetative state; she's not in a coma. She's dead."
"Her body is not functioning. Her brain is not producing the hormones required to sustain a pregnancy."
"This family is being put to torture. I did this of my own free will, and I am still traumatized," she concludes.
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People replied to the video in droves. This person wrote about how having a body that is technically "alive" is only one part of the equation in a healthy pregnancy.
Someone else echoed what Jennifer said in the video about the crucial difference in having the choice to be kept on life support; she replied, "Pregnant Georgia women seem to belong to the state not to them selves."
A lot of other folks just said that what's happening to Adriana Smith is wrong:
Another creator, Grace Wells (@0fficial.c0wgirl on TikTok), made a video with the heading, "What does it mean to be born of a corpse?"
"Adriana smith deserves to rest. Her family deserves peace. Humanity deserves safety from birth by corpse," she captioned the video.
"You think that a brain-dead person just isn't conscious anymore and their body's all working and so their body's just gonna grow the baby either way?" she says. "That's not what's happening."
"It is not pro-life to force a child to be born of a corpse," Grace repeats twice. "And what are the medical implications of a fetus gestating in the chemical environment of a corpse, of a brain-dead person who has to be on medication to regulate every single bodily function because their brain cannot do it because they are dead?"
"You can't even eat lunch meat when you are pregnant. But you think it's pro-life to force a brain-dead person, a corpse, to be medically kept some semblance of alive to force the birth of a 9-week-old fetus?" Wells says.
"If that's something that you can justify, we have very different interpretations of what is sacred," Wells says. "What does it mean for us as a society that we are attempting to do this as a political stunt? Force a child to be born of a corpse."
She also says that if Smith's child is born healthy enough to grow up, they will "live with the public political fear of keeping their dead mother on life support [...] following them for the rest of their life. That's not pro-life. That's not compassionate. It's not Christian. It's not healthy. It's disgusting. It's desecration of a corpse. It's horrific."
The comments resoundingly agreed. Some pointed out how Adriana Smith's case joins the long history of medical abuse and racism toward Black women.
"It's so sick. I also think about trauma and medical debt they are laying on her poor family," this person wrote.
One user pointed out the hypocrisy of this case within the "pro-life" movement.
And finally, someone shared the haunting reality that may await Adriana Smith's unborn child:
What are your thoughts? We want to hear in the comments.
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