Latest news with #AdrianaSmith
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Critics of Georgia's abortion ban push for clarity after another case makes international news
Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes speaks at against Georgia's abortion law at the state Capitol. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder Georgia Democrats are calling for clarity in the state's abortion law as the case of Adriana Smith continues to grab headlines worldwide. Undiagnosed blood clots in Smith's brain left the 30-year-old nurse brain dead months ago, but doctors have kept her organs functioning through medical devices. Family members told media outlets Smith's body was being kept alive despite no chance for her to recover because she is pregnant and removing her from life support could violate the state's ban on most abortions after six weeks. Georgia's top lawyer disagrees with that interpretation of the law. 'There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death,' Attorney General Chris Carr said in a statement. 'Removing life support is not an action 'with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.'' But a public statement does not come with the force of law, said Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes, a Duluth Democrat, and when it comes to the practice of medicine, legal gray areas can lead to tragic outcomes. Speaking at a press conference Thursday at the state Capitol, Islam Parkes called on Carr to issue a legally binding opinion to answer a series of questions she said would spell out when doctors could treat a pregnant woman in a way that could harm or kill the fetus: Is a hospital legally required to maintain a brain dead pregnant woman on life support? What precisely constitutes a medical emergency under the law? Under what conditions does a pregnancy meet the threshold of incompatibility with life? How does the law affect legal standing of advanced directives and end-of-life planning for pregnant Georgians? 'These questions are not theoretical,' Islam Parkes said. 'They're urgent, because as long as this law remains vague, we will continue to see families traumatized, providers criminalized and patients left behind. Doctors are being forced to make impossible choices, families are trapped in grief and fear and women are dying.' Islam Parkes was referencing two high-profile deaths, Georgians Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who both died in 2022 after suffering complications from taking abortion pills. Thurman died in a hospital after doctors waited nearly a day to perform a routine procedure to remove fetal tissue from her uterus; Miller died after family members said she was afraid to seek medical care because of the recently enacted law. Democrats said there are likely more cases that do not end in death. of Gwinnett said she had already picked out a name for her unborn daughter, Sawyer Nicole Christian, but in March, a day after Maruscak held a gender reveal party, she discovered her daughter's heart had stopped beating. 'In a matter of seconds, we went from preparing to welcome her into our lives to trying to figure out how to say goodbye,' she said at the Capitol press conference. 'My doctor was sympathetic, but because of the restrictive abortion laws, my care was limited to a list of abortion clinics. No follow-up plan, no guidance and no support. Over the next two days, I called clinic after clinic, continuously having to repeat and relive that Sawyer did not have a heartbeat. My insurance recommended me to go to the emergency department because of increasing septic symptoms, so I did. I spent seven hours there in pain, in grief, and in shock, only to be discharged with no treatment, no resolution and no care.' Maruscak said she spent more than a week carrying her daughter's remains. 'What happened to me is not rare. It is not an outlier. It's happening every day,' she said. 'One in four women experience a miscarriage. Over half of them need medical intervention to complete it safely. This is not just a political issue, it's a medical one.' Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones made no bones about the party's ultimate goal of repealing the six-week abortion ban, which went into effect in 2022 after the United States Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion and left the matter to states. 'As that fight continues, we must stand with and demand clarification from our governor and attorney general,' Jones said. 'What rights do women have under this law? Georgians have been asking this question. We as legislators have been asking this question and the people standing here today have been asking this question, yet Georgia's leadership has stayed silent.' The author of Georgia's abortion bill, Acworth Republican Sen. Ed Setzler, accused Democrats of playing politics in an attempt to drum up headlines. 'My heart goes out to Adriana, her family, and the young son inside of her who is struggling for his life,' Setzler said. 'Nabilah Islam Parkes and the Democrats are sickening at the depths they will go to drag Adriana's hurting family, who is trying to save the life of their grandson, through a sick political debate about expanding abortion.' 'The Democrats are making attacks as loudly as they can to try to seize media attention,' he added. Conservative radio host and Georgia Life Alliance board member Martha Zoller said tragic cases like Maruscak's are not the result of the state's abortion ban – sometimes referred to by supporters as the 'heartbeat bill' – but of hospitals misunderstanding or misapplying it. 'Once you've had a miscarriage or you're in the process of a miscarriage, there is no heartbeat, so there should be no reason for care to be withheld or anything like that,' she said. 'That's the over-legalization of the medical care business with not allowing providers to be providers and to do what's best for patients. And that has nothing to do with the heartbeat bill. That has to do with the structure at the hospital. The care for a miscarriage is not denoted as something that's a method of abortion in the heartbeat bill, and once you've had a miscarriage, there is no heartbeat, so the heartbeat bill doesn't come into play.' 'It's a travesty that the Democratic caucus continues to mislead women and scare them for their own political purposes,' she added. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
In Georgia, a baby is growing inside his brain-dead mother, reigniting a debate about personhood — and abortion
Adriana Smith was 8 weeks pregnant when she was rushed to the hospital after experiencing severe headaches and breathing problems that were later diagnosed as the result of blood clots in her brain. The Georgia woman was later declared brain dead, and doctors told her family there was nothing more that they could do for her. There was, however, something they could do for Smith's baby — keep his mother nourished and breathing via life support, which is being done, even as some media coverage presents the case as a dystopian side effect of the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, which returned abortion law to the states. NPR's headline read: 'Hospital tells family brain-dead woman must carry fetus due to abortion ban.' ' Ms. Magazine's take was 'Adriana Smith and the Legal Horror of Reproductive Servitude in the U.S.' A USA Today headline read: 'A brain dead pregnant woman is a horror story. And it's Republicans' fault.' And in The Cut, 'We're just human incubators to them.' The reaction has shown American culture's unwillingness to acknowledge nuance, even when stories are deeply complex, as this one is. The case has also reignited the debate over 'personhood,' broadly seen as the legal conferral of rights and protections to a human being. But the heart of the story is not politics or the law, but what it means to be human, and protected and loved. In her new book, entitled 'Personhood,' Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, argues that the anti-abortion movement in the United States is better described as a 'fetal-personhood movement,' one that makes claims about the U.S. Constitution. Over the past five decades, Ziegler writes, 'fetal-personhood claims have involved two core arguments: first, that a fetus is a separate, unique human individual from the moment of fertilization, and second, that because of that biological and moral uniqueness, the Constitution gives (or at least should give) that individual rights.' Into this debate comes the 30-year-old nurse on life support at Emory University Hospital Midtown, a teaching hospital in Atlanta. Hers is not the first such case, but it comes at a time of heightened political tension, and initial remarks made by Smith's mother inadvertently helped to politicize the case. April Newkirk has said that the family should have made the decision to keep her daughter on life support, not the state, and that she was worried that the child could be born with severe medical conditions that the family would have to contend with, in addition to caring for Smith's other child. (Smith, a nurse, is unmarried and has a 7-year-old son.) 'I'm not saying we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy, what I'm saying is, we should have had a choice,' Newkirk told a local reporter. News reports quickly linked her remarks to Georgia's abortion law, which protects a fetus from the time a heartbeat is detected, usually around 6 weeks of gestation. But the Georgia Attorney General's Office has said that the law does not apply in this case. In a statement provided to the Deseret News, a spokesperson said, 'Our prayers go out to the family of Adriana Smith during this difficult time. 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'.' It is unclear who made the decision to keep Smith on life support, but Ziegler said in an interview that it's understandable that people conflate the issues because 'Georgia's law is a personhood law. It's not just an abortion ban.' When enacted, the LIFE act upended all of Georgia's laws because it said 'a 'natural person' is entitled to a robust body of civil rights — all of which, in Georgia, now apply to fetuses," Rachel Garbus wrote for Atlanta magazine. Fetuses are now counted in the state's census; pregnant women are entitled to child support and tax deductions. Some scholars have said that fetal personhood allows for the prosecution of a pregnant women for child abuse. It could be, Ziegler said, that although the attorney general said the removal of life support from a pregnant woman is not abortion, the hospital and its doctors reasonably fear that they could be charged with murder under the law. 'We've seen since Roe was overturned that a lot of doctors are very risk averse. ... They are erring on the side of caution because they could face felony criminal charges and really serious fines and the loss of their medical license,' she said. 'If there's any kind of ambiguity, even if it's not significant ambiguity, doctors are really reluctant to face the kinds of negative outcomes that are possible. 'Reasonable lawyers could disagree about whether taking her off life support would constitute an abortion, too. I know the attorney general's position is that it wouldn't, but that doesn't mean that's how prosecutors would see it,' Ziegler said. However, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that because Smith is considered dead legally, there is nothing in the law that requires doctors to keep her on life support. But, he said, 'It is a challenging case ethically and requires careful thought and discernment.' Kheriaty personally believes that either choice can be morally and ethically permissible, and ideally the decision should be made by 'people who knew her the best,' based on what they believe the mother would have wanted — what medical and legal professionals call 'the substituted judgment criteria.' And we shouldn't assume that every mother would want their child delivered in these circumstances, even if medically possible, he said. 'My reading in this case (Adriana Smith) is that the family is kind of conflicted.' That is all the more reason, he said, that the case should be 'de-politicized and brought out of the abortion debate.' He added, 'I'm glad the AG's office is trying to make clear that the state's abortion law has nothing to do with this. The family needs to be supported. They don't need to be vacuumed up into debates about abortion.' Smith's case is not unique; there have been similar tragedies, but this appears to be the first one in the U.S. since the Dobbs decision, which in part accounts for the hyper-politicized media coverage. In 2013, a 33-year-old Texas woman who was 14 weeks' pregnant was declared brain-dead after suffering blood clots. After a two-month legal battle, a judge ordered life support removed. The woman's child was considered 'non-viable' because it had been deprived of oxygen for nearly an hour. In that case, the family wanted the life-support removed, while the hospital said it could not legally do so under Texas law. There have been other cases with happier outcomes. In 2005, a 26-year-old pregnant woman who suffered a hemorrhage because of advanced melanoma was kept on life support in Arlington, Virginia, for three months; her daughter was born prematurely but survived. The woman's family issued a statement that said, " Her passing is a testament to the truth that human life is a gift from God and that children are always to be fought for, even if life requires ... the last full measure of devotion.' In 2015, a 22-year-old Nebraska woman who was 4 1/2 months pregnant was declared brain-dead after a sudden intracranial hemorrhage. Her son was delivered 54 days later, weighing just under 3 pounds, and his mother became an organ donor. 'Not only did she stay alive for 54 days after what happened to her, to give her baby life, but she also saved the lives of three other people,' the woman's mother, Berta Jimenez, said at the time. Ziegler, at the University of California, Davis, believes that the battle over personhood will be a 'new civil war' in this country and will require people to think more deeply about an issue that, until this point, was 'sort of an abstraction.' 'A lot of conservatives believe not only that life begins at conception, but also rights begin at conception, without really having followed through what that means in cases like this one,' she said. 'People are going to either not go a step further like Georgia did and not have personhood laws ... or they are going to have to say 'here is what personhood means and here is what it doesn't mean.'' A similar debate about the rights of embryos arose last year when the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling about embryo storage after in vitro fertilization procedures. 'There's not enough clarity at the moment about what Republicans mean when they say personhood begins at fertilization,' Ziegler said. Explicit carve-outs for unusual situations would be helpful, particularly in states with strict abortion laws, she said, as would giving doctors assurances that they won't face prosecution for making decisions in good faith. Nationwide, the definition of personhood remains 'a disputed question in the law and in medical ethics,' Kheriaty said. 'The word 'person' does occur in the Constitution, in the 14th Amendment, and some have argued, including Josh Craddock, who is a legal scholar, that the word person in the Constitution should include unborn human beings." But others say that not all human organisms should have the rights of personhood, with the philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer even arguing that infanticide can be morally permissible. 'I personally think that's the road to every bad thing that's ever been done in human history,' Kheriaty said. He also noted that the Smith case raises a range of ethical questions, including whether America's standard for brain death, decided in the 1960s by a Harvard University committee, is the correct one, given that Smith is still able to gestate a child in her condition. 'A case like this raises questions about whether she is really dead,' he said. Newkirk, the pregnant woman's mother, has recently said that the family hopes the child, a boy they have named Chance, will survive. Doctors believe the child can be safely delivered around the middle of August. 'Right now, the journey is for baby Chance to survive — and whatever condition God allows him to come here in, we're going to love him just the same," Newkirk told 11Alive reporter Cody Alcorn.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Lawmakers want clarification on abortion bill after controversy over brain-dead pregnant woman
Some Democratic state senators are demanding that the state attorney general clarify just what the Georgia Life Act covers. The law essentially bans all abortions in Georgia after about six weeks. The move comes over controversy surrounding the case of Adriana Smith, a pregnant woman from Lithonia. Her mother said she's brain-dead but is being kept on life support at Emory Midtown. The mother said they couldn't remove that life support because it would impact the baby's life, and Emory said it would violate Georgia's abortion law. Emory cannot comment on the case because of federal privacy laws, but did issue a statement which reads in part, 'Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia's abortion law.' TRENDING STORIES: Tornado touches down in Henry County, 18-year-old critically injured 'Life doesn't feel real:' Family mourns GA 9-year-old found shot in car SWAT team, multiple DeKalb police units respond to barricaded suspect on Lavista Road Smith's mother initially supported an abortion but told Channel 2's Richard Elliot off-camera that she supports the child's birth. On Thursday, some Democratic state lawmakers demanded that Gov. Brian Kemp request a formal legal opinion from the Attorney General's office about the Life Act. 'We said this law is vague,' State Rep. Park Cannon said. The AG's office said last week that the Life Act doesn't apply in the Smith case, and in a statement, the governor's office said, 'Holding a partisan press conference does not change the fact that the attorney general's office has already answered this question in the clearest possible terms.' Still, Duluth Democrat Nabilah Islam-Parkes thinks an official opinion is needed. 'We are calling on the governor to do his job and request a formal opinion from the AG telling the people of Georgia what this law actually means,' Islam-Parkes said. Republican state Sen. Ed Setzler wrote the Life Act. In a statement, he said that his heart goes out to Smith and her family. He also condemned those Democrats, saying they were hurting Smith's family by dragging them through 'a sick political debate.'
The Independent
3 days ago
- Health
- The Independent
The brain-dead American woman being forced to have her baby – and why the UK must stay vigilant
We're just human incubators to them,' say the headlines. The reality behind them is more harrowing still. Adriana Smith's story has, for the last few weeks, prompted uniform outrage around the world – a 30-year-old nurse from Georgia, brain-dead, kept alive only by machines against her family's wishes. Adriana should have been laid to rest months ago: the blood clots on her brain, found when she was admitted to hospital with severe pain in February, mean that, legally, she is no longer living. Except, she was nine weeks pregnant. For more than 90 days, Adriana's body has been kept artificially alive, officially no longer her own, to prioritise the weeks-old pregnancy. Despite the protests of her grieving family – including her mother and her seven-year-old son – medics at the Emory University Hospital say there is no choice. The state of Georgia is answerable: its six-week abortion ban, known as the heartbeat law, which prohibits the termination of a pregnancy once a heartbeat has been detected, constitutes 'foetal personhood' and declares the foetus an individual patient. The 'personhood' of a woman like Adriana, then, is denied. There is no denying how monstrous the situation is – and how unbelievable it should be. In 2019, the very year that Georgia's heartbeat bill was passed, a like-for-like depiction of Adriana's story provided a stark warning in series three of the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Back then, it was the shocking, but dystopian – imagined – consequence of the end of bodily autonomy; little more than five years later, it's a reality that has not only sparked furious indignation, but further highlighted the maternal mortality crisis continuing to affect Black women. The foetus in Adriana's body is now 23 weeks – over halfway to full gestation – and she will remain in this position, between life and death, for at least another 10 weeks. According to reports, doctors have seen fluid in the foetus's brain; it's not clear whether it will survive. 'My grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, we don't know if he'll live once she has him,' April Newkirk, Adriana's mother, told the Atlanta TV channel WXIA. The family are already now facing an untold financial burden on top of the sudden loss of Adriana. 'And I'm not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy. What I'm saying is we should have had a choice.' In the US, not much has been heard from anti- abortion groups who lobbied for these laws in response to the family going public. In fact, most have been curiously quiet despite their seeds having been sown. The writer and activist Jessica Valenti called them cowards – 'it's that simple', she wrote last week. But in that silence a precedent could be set. Adriana might be the first woman we know of publicly to have been subjected to something so cruel, but it's unlikely she'll be the last. 'This is the effect of abortion bans – this is what happens when women are treated like incubators, whether they are alive or dead,' Rachael Clarke, head of advocacy at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), says. 'The only purpose of women in these states, essentially, is to bear children that many of them do not want or cannot care for. We've seen the impact that bans have on women's lives; we've seen the impact on their health and their children's health. It's nothing but vindictive.' Around the world, the statistics speak for themselves. Where abortion rights are granted, rates drop, as do the number of maternal deaths – in Nepal, for example, the number of women dying due to pregnancy and childbirth dropped by 72 per cent after abortion was legalised. Generally, more reproductive rights lead to strong communities and even economies. The UK appears to be one of the most progressive countries when it comes to reproductive rights, yet abortion is still not entirely legal here. The 1967 Abortion Act, now 58 years old and decidedly unfit for purpose, allows terminations only under specific, limited circumstances. Anything outside of those carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Outside of those parameters (before 23 weeks and six days' gestation; being given permission to terminate by two doctors who must decide 'in good faith' that carrying on a pregnancy would cause a woman physical or mental harm), abortion is illegal. And right now, that law is increasingly putting British women at risk. 'What we've seen in the past couple of weeks is worrying,' Clarke says. A conversation has been bubbling after new guidance from the National Police Chiefs' Council, quietly published in January, came to light, informing UK police how to search a woman's phone and menstrual tracking apps, along with her home, following a 'suspicious' pregnancy loss. 'These kinds of things are really damaging and really quite terrifying to women who learn about them. 'The shocking thing is, actually, you look at some of the comments on social media, and people are saying that they don't understand why stories are on their feed – they think that it's about America. And you have to say, 'No, this is something that is happening in England and Wales'.' In fact, even in America, a pregnant woman who ends her own pregnancy outside of the law can't be criminalised. Yet in the UK, prosecutions are actually increasing. Despite there only having been a handful of known convictions in the 160 years since the Offences against the Person Act, which criminalises the act of inducing a termination – taking pills, for example – was first introduced in England and Wales, in just the last two years six women have been charged under the act and appeared in court, an unprecedented number. The question is, why? Clarke says that there isn't one answer, but it could partly come down to a trend – that police officers and CPS lawyers are seeing more cases reported and are therefore more hyper-aware. 'And what we see then is quite a lot of overzealous interest in some women, including some women who have not taken any medication, who have not had any role in a premature birth or a stillbirth, but because police have seen it on the news and in reporting, or in the guidance that went out in the last few months, it makes them suspicious of women in a way that they may not have been 10 years ago. As a result, these women are paying the price.' 'The case of Adriana is very much one that law professors would theorise about – what would happen if we have foetal personhood? What would we do if a mother fell ill?' says Sam Yousef, chair of the board of trustees of Reproductive Justice Initiative. 'Now it's actually happened, we've seen the legislation has [had a] chilling effect on medical practitioners who are so worried about the law that they can't do right for the patient, or what's right for the family. 'And I think that's also what we're seeing in the UK in terms of people feeling that they have to report people to the police in any way, shape or form if they're 'worried' about a miscarriage or abortion they've witnessed, or the circumstances surrounding it.' It could also be part of the cultural misogyny seen accompanying political shifts to the right; abortion rights often go hand in hand with other liberal causes, many of which have recently been under threat, adds Yousef. 'At the core of this is bodily autonomy,' he says. 'There's the increased policing and reporting, but something also seems to have changed within the Crown Prosecution Service and the police, where they seem to be more willing and wanting to take up these cases. This is the effect of abortion bans – this is what happens when women are treated like incubators, whether they are alive or dead Rachael Clarke, head of advocacy at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service 'That probably has to do with the narratives that are being pushed around abortion. We know that there's more money being funnelled into the UK for anti-abortion activist groups from the US. We don't know loads about them but we do know that, in some cases, in the largest anti-abortion lobbying groups from the US, these are the groups that are also campaigning against things like trans rights.' Clarke adds that the cases we see in public – that of Bethany Cox, for example, a 22-year-old from Eaglescliffe in Stockton who was found not guilty of child destruction and using misoprostol to procure her own miscarriage in 2020 – are not the full picture. 'It's been six women in court in the last couple of years, but as a sector we've probably had about 100 requests from the police for medical records of women they're suspicious of and they're investigating,' she explains. 'So these women who are appearing in court and the one woman who spent time in prison are really just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath there are huge numbers of women who are being caught up by the police, who might end up being arrested, released on bail, who might have bail conditions put in around not being allowed access to children or their own children – even social services get pulled into it.' Most of the women never make it to court because there isn't enough evidence or it's 'not in the public interest', 'but it doesn't stop the police searching their houses, seizing their phones, keeping them from their kids'. The damage lingers: despite our progress, a stigma still very much exists. And a law that hauls often desperate, vulnerable women into police cells from hospital beds and denies them medical care only does further harm. BPAS have been campaigning to decriminalise abortion since 2012 – and still now the fight is not over. Currently, they are working with Tonia Antoniazzi, a Welsh Labour MP who has an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill which would remove women from the criminal abortion law. It's supported by 50 organisations – including five medical Royal Colleges, violence against women and girls groups, trade unions, abortion providers and more than 90 MPs have signed up to it ahead of the vote to pass it in June (you can use their easy tool to write to your MP in support). 'It's time for abortion to be what it is, which is a healthcare procedure and a healthcare decision, and for full abortion rights and reproductive rights and justice to be finally fulfilled so that people can get the care that they need and they deserve,' says Yousef. It feels hopeful – but there are no guarantees. Adriana's family must continue to endure the terrible fate constructed by laws intended to harm women like her. But her story doesn't exist in a vacuum – she is not an anomaly, far from it. During the last parliament there were several attempts to restrict access to abortion, including an amendment to cut the legal limit from 24 weeks to 22, vocally supported by Reform UK's leader, Nigel Farage. 'Extreme' anti-abortion protestors from the US have already moved into the UK, increasing their spending here and lobbying susceptible MPs. For the sake of women like Adriana, complacency isn't an option.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
People Are Absolutely Outraged Over A Black Woman In Georgia Being Forced To Carry A Pregnancy To Term — Even Though She Is Legally Dead
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. Related: This Reporter's Reaction To Donald Trump Talking About The Declaration Of Independence Is Going Viral "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. Related: A Clip Of Donald Trump Getting Angry After Being Fact-Checked Is Going Mega Viral, And It Sums Up His Entire Presidency In A Nutshell 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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