Adriana Smith died more than three months ago. The 30-year-old mother and nurse learned, too late, that her brain was full of blood clots. Surgery to address the issue was unsuccessful, and she was declared braindead. But while brain death is the legal and medical definition of being dead, Smith’s body has been kept alive for the past three months because of Georgia’s abortion laws, which forbids abortion if fetal cardiac activity can be detected. At the time of her death, Smith was almost nine weeks pregnant. And so she will be kept on a ventilator for another few months until doctors can deliver her son. Her family had no say in the matter.
Smith started getting headaches very early in her pregnancy. The pain was so intense that she knew this wasn’t an ordinary headache and she went to the hospital.
“They gave her some medication, but they didn’t do any tests,” her mother, April Newkirk, told NBC affiliate 11Alive.
But the next morning, Smith’s boyfriend — who had asked doctors to keep her at the hospital — realized something was wrong: she was gasping for air and gargling what seemed to be blood. At another hospital, the doctors ordered a CT scan and found the fatal blood clots.
“It’s torture for me,” Newkirk told 11Alive. “I come here and I see my daughter breathing on a ventilator, but she’s not there.”
In addition to the emotional anguish her family endures, they also worry about the future. Newkirk reports that her unborn grandson has fluid on his brain, which could lead to long-term medical complications including blindness and the inability to walk and maybe even death. The family is also concerned about the mounting medical bills, which they are responsible for despite having no say in Smith’s treatment.
“It should have been left up to the family,” Newkirk said, noting that she and her husband are now in the position to help Smith’s partner raise her children. She continued. “I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy, but I’m saying we should have had a choice.”
Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, more commonly known as the “heartbeat bill,” was signed into law in 2019 by Republican governor Brian Kemp, but could not go into effect until after Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. At the time, Kemp lauded the new law “a declaration that all lives have value.” The sponsor of the bill, State Representative Ed Setzler (also a Republican), defended the law as pragmatic and practical. “Once the shrill attacks of the opponents sort of fade into the background,” he told 11Alive at the signing ceremony, “I think the common sense of Georgians will kick in and recognize that House Bill 41 is a common sense measure that we can all be proud of.”
While the LIFE Act carves out abortion exceptions for rape and medical necessity, Smith’s case does not fall within those parameters since, technically speaking, her life is no longer at risk. The situation has been likened on social media to The Handmaid’s Tale, specifically an episode in which a braindead Black woman was kept alive to serve as an incubator to continue a pregnancy.
But the TV show was not a prophecy. Margaret Atwood famously wrote the original 1985 novel based on events that had already happened and, indeed, Smith is not the first woman to be kept artificially alive in order to give birth. In 2015, a woman in Nebraska was kept alive — at her family’s behest — in order to deliver her baby 54 days after she was declared braindead. Similar cases in British Columbia and Texas also made headlines in the past decade or so.
More recently, in Brazil, the case of Joyce Sousa Araújo closely parallels that of Smith: Sousa Araújo also suffered from strong headaches that were ultimately linked to an aneurysm and brain swelling that surgery could not ameliorate. She was declared braindead but, at six months pregnant, was kept artificially alive in order to deliver her child in accordance with Brazil’s abortion laws, which forbid the procedure around three months. Sousa Araújo, too, also has other children.
Smith’s family visits her body every day, including her young son, who believes his mother is sleeping.
