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CBS News
16-05-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Hospital tells family brain-dead Georgia woman must carry fetus to birth because of abortion ban
What abortion rights might look like under a new Trump administration A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital told them was required under the state's strict anti-abortion law. With her due date still more than three months away, it could be one of the longest such pregnancies. Her family is upset that Georgia's law, which restricts abortion once cardiac activity is detected, doesn't allow relatives to have a say in whether a pregnant woman is kept on life support. Georgia's "heartbeat law" is among the restrictive abortion statutes that have been put in place in many conservative states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago. Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, was declared brain-dead - meaning she is legally dead - in February, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station WXIA. Newkirk said her daughter had intense headaches more than three months ago and went to Atlanta's Northside Hospital, where she received medication and was released. The next morning, her boyfriend woke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain-dead. Newkirk said Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Removing breathing tubes and other life-saving devices would likely kill the fetus. Northside did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Emory Healthcare said it could not comment on an individual case because of privacy rules, but released a statement saying it "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 laws and all other applicable laws. Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve." Smith's family says Emory doctors have told them they are not allowed to stop or remove the devices that are keeping her breathing because state law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected - generally around six weeks into pregnancy. The law was adopted in 2019 but not enforced until after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling, opening the door to state abortion bans. Twelve states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy and three others have bans like Georgia's that kick in after about six weeks. Like the others, Georgia's ban includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to maintain the woman's life. Those exceptions have been at the heart of legal and political questions, including a major Texas Supreme Court ruling last year that found the ban there applies even when there are major pregnancy complications. Smith's family, including her five-year-old son, still visit her in the hospital. Newkirk told WXIA that doctors told the family that the fetus has fluid on the brain and that they're concerned about his health. "She's pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he's born," Newkirk said. She has not said whether the family wants Smith removed from life support. Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Georgia's abortion law, said the situation is problematic. "Her family deserved the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions," Simpson said in a statement. "Instead, they have endured over 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing." Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, said she does not believe life support is legally required in this case. But she said whether a state could insist Smith remains on life support is uncertain since the overturning of Roe, which found that fetuses do not have the rights of people. "Pre-Dobbs, a fetus didn't have any rights," Shepherd said. "And the state's interest in fetal life could not be so strong as to overcome other important rights, but now we don't know." The situation echoes a case in Texas more than a decade ago when a brain-dead woman was kept on life support for about two months because she was pregnant. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital was misapplying state law, and life support was removed. Brain death in pregnancy is rare. Even rarer still are cases in which doctors aim to prolong the pregnancy after a woman is declared brain-dead. "It's a very complex situation, obviously, not only ethically but also medically," said Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. A 2021 review that Berghella co-authored scoured medical literature going back decades for cases in which doctors declared a woman brain-dead and aimed to prolong her pregnancy. It found 35. Of those, 27 resulted in a live birth, the majority either immediately declared healthy or with normal follow-up tests. But Berghella also cautioned that the Georgia case was much more difficult because the pregnancy was less far along when the woman was declared brain dead. In the 35 cases he studied, doctors were able to prolong the pregnancy by an average of just seven weeks before complications forced them to intervene. "It's just hard to keep the mother out of infection, out of cardiac failure," he said. Berghella also found a case from Germany that resulted in a live birth when the woman was declared brain dead at nine weeks of pregnancy - about as far along as Smith was when she died. Georgia's law confers personhood on a fetus. Those who favor personhood say fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses should be considered people with the same rights as those already born. Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican who sponsored the 2019 law, said he supported Emory's interpretation. "I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child," Setzler said. "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." Setzler said he believes it is sometimes acceptable to remove life support from someone who is brain dead, but that the law is "an appropriate check" because the mother is pregnant. He said Smith's relatives have "good choices," including keeping the child or offering it for adoption. Georgia's abortion ban has been in the spotlight before. Last year, ProPublica reported that two Georgia women died after they did not get proper medical treatment for complications from taking abortion pills. The stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller entered into the presidential race, with Democrat Kamala Harris saying the deaths were the result of the abortion bans that went into effect in Georgia and elsewhere after Dobbs.
New York Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In This Novel, Most Abortions Are Illegal. A Clinic Worker Fights Back.
Though the decision to seek an abortion is an inherently private one, walking into an abortion clinic in the United States can be an uncannily public act. A patient may have to dodge protesters trying to block her path to the building, or hide her face as they brandish photos of fetal remains. This disconnect between the politicization of female bodies and the personal experience of inhabiting them is darkly fitting: Roe v. Wade derived the right to abortion from the right to privacy; after Roe was overturned, individual lives became a matter of communal interest. It is a disconnect that haunts 'State Champ,' the sixth book by the novelist, poet and nonfiction writer Hilary Plum. The novel follows Angela Peterson, a 28-year-old receptionist at an abortion clinic in an unnamed Midwestern state where a 'heartbeat law' has recently banned most abortions after six weeks. After Angela's boss, Dr. M, is sentenced to at least 12 years in prison for violating this law, a jobless Angela takes up residence in the defunct clinic and stops eating. Reporters show up to interview and photograph her. The novel takes the form of her hunger strike journal, which she jots on exam table paper. In the public imagination, Angela passes for a noble dissenter. In private, the snarky former state-champion runner with a history of D.U.I.s, a hearty sexual appetite and disordered eating is less saintly. Protest doesn't come naturally to her: She is 'not much of a sign waver.' She struggles to articulate the 'goals' of her self-sacrifice. Does she expect it to free Dr. M? Is starving herself a spiritual act? Or is she just a garden-variety 'anorexic slut,' as she puts it? 'State Champ' admirably resists the interpretive clarity the world craves from Angela. This feels true to the lived experience of protest: It can be alienating to translate the yearning to possess your own body, whether by aborting a fetus or starving yourself, into a public message. 'The law is over here, it's up here, it's on the surface,' Angela tells one journalist. 'When someone gets pregnant, it has to do with her up-here life, but it's really a conversation the body is having with other bodies, including itself. … The law can't get at what this is about.' So, during her 39-day strike, Angela communes not with the outside world but with an inner one. Her own inner conversation, driven by self-deprivation, engages with a long lineage of isolated, unraveling female narrators, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' to Clarice Lispector's in 'The Passion According to G.H.' Plum's contributions to this canon are often funny, and pleasantly odd: 'Janine's boobs were her whole point of view,' Angela thinks about her nemesis, an anti-abortion activist with a penchant for handing out baby dolls to the clinic's patients; 14 days into her fast, Angela muses, 'My hunger strike is ovulating.' But Angela's mental state never quite approaches the madness of her predecessors' (Gilman's protagonist is subsumed into the walls that confine her; Lispector's devours the insides of a dead cockroach and abandons language altogether). And as Angela grows increasingly delirious with hunger, Plum fragments her prose into a kind of self-conscious poetry that strains beneath the weight of the plot. But the pleasure of this book lies not in its plot or even in its characters (Angela is more voice than character), but in the intimacy of its setting: the clinic that increasingly becomes the estranged Angela's entire world. When the six-week ban came down, 'the phones were ringing and the clock was ticking,' Plum writes, 'like some supreme clock somewhere or every little clock everywhere, I was getting a feeling like everyone's personal biological clock was in me, like that kids' movie where a crocodile swallowed an alarm clock and he's coming for you.' As Angela points out, the judicial system may not be able to comprehend the ungovernable parts of our bodies and minds, to hear those ticking clocks inside us — but a novel can.
