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A draconian “heartbeat law” in Georgia is forcing a brain-dead pregnant woman to be kept on life support for months so she can deliver — all at the expense of her family.
As Atlanta’s WXIA-TV reports, the family of 30-year-old Adriana Smith, a nurse at the city’s Emory University Hospital, was declared brain-dead more than 90 days ago after doctors found that she had blood clots in her brain.
It’s a particularly horrifying situation, highlighting the alarming state of reproductive rights in the US, especially following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which struck down federal protections for abortion rights.
Smith, as her mother, April Newkirk, told the broadcaster, was initially taken to the hospital for bad headaches earlier in her pregnancy. She was given medication and discharged — only to wake her boyfriend the next morning with loud, gurgling gasps for air.
Upon finally conducting CT scans, doctors at Emory University discovered the clots. The window to do surgery to relieve the pressure had passed, and the young woman’s family was left with few options but to let the clots take their course.
Smith’s body still hasn’t been taken off of life support thanks to Georgia’s “Living Infants Fairness and Equality” Act, which stipulates that after six weeks, when fetal heartbeats generally begin to be detected, any fetal death — including in the case of miscarriage — becomes illegal.
Though there are carveouts in the case of rape, incest, or the mother’s life being in danger, Smith’s case falls into a legal grey area.
Because her life is not per se “at risk” following the cessation of brain activity, Emory doctors decided that she must be kept alive until the child is ready to be delivered so that the fetus gestating will not die, a technicality required by Georgia’s heartbeat law and many others like it that have proliferated in the three years since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
At press time, Smith is about 21 weeks or five months pregnant, and the fetus growing inside her will only be considered viable at 32 weeks or more, which means that she has to be kept on life support for at least 11 more weeks under the hospital’s strict reading of the law.
According to Newkirk, the doctors at her daughter’s former employer told her that there were no other legal avenues to pursue while they wait for the fetus to be viable for birth. She’s concerned not only about the child she’s soon going to have to raise, who may well have serious impairments due to his mother being in a vegetative state, but also about the massive bill she’ll be footing.
“They’re hoping to get the baby to at least 32 weeks,” Newkirk told WXIA. “But every day that goes by, it’s more cost, more trauma, more questions.”
In a statement to Newsweek, Emory representatives insisted their decision was made after consulting “consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance.”
Ironically, the relevant heartbill law — which was passed in 2019 but did not go into effect until 2022, when Roe was overturned — was rescinded for a week after a county court found that the state could not interfere with personal reproductive decisions prior to fetus viability at 32 weeks.
Georgia’s Supreme Court overruled that decision and reinstated the ban shortly thereafter, a move described by Monica Simpson of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective as “[siding] with anti-abortion extremists.”
Newkirk, meanwhile, said she’s not sure what Smith or her family would have chosen had she been given the option to terminate the pregnancy to save her own life or be allowed to die naturally.
Nonetheless, it should have been their choice to make.
“I think every woman should have the right to make their own decision,” the mother told WXIA-TV. “And if not, then their partner or their parents.”
More on reproductive weirdness: Trump Appears to Have Accidentally Declared That Every Person in America Is Now Female
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