Translated with AI
After nearly four months on life support at an Atlanta hospital, nurse Adriana Smith, who was diagnosed as brain dead in February, has given birth to a premature baby boy weighing about 820g, the BBC reports.
As the mother of the woman in labor, April Newkirk, told reporters, the Caesarean section of Adriana, who formally turned 31 in June, was performed on Friday. Since Tuesday, June 17, her relatives have allowed the woman to be disconnected from the equipment that has kept her alive for the past several months, the leading local newspaper Atlanta Journal – Constitution reported.
"It's hard to even comprehend," Newkirk admitted on a local TV station. "I'm her mother. I shouldn't have to bury my own daughter. She should be burying me."
The reason doctors at Emory University Hospital kept the woman alive for so long was because she was about eight or nine weeks pregnant when she became brain dead, and Georgia law prohibits terminating a pregnancy once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (which happens around six weeks).
So the baby born Friday, named Chance, was born about three months early and was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.
As his grandmother April said, the baby is doing great so far and doctors "expect him to be fine."
Details of the story emerged in May when Smith's mother told a local television station that the decision to keep the patient on life support was made by doctors without consulting her family.
"I'm not saying we would have decided to terminate her pregnancy," Newkirk said at the time. "What I'm saying is we should have at least been given the choice."
Medical records show that Smith first went to the doctor complaining of headaches earlier this year, in February, when she was already pregnant.
After examining the patient, the therapist prescribed her some medication, but the next morning the woman’s boyfriend called the hospital and said that Adriana was suffocating.
Smith, 30, was rushed to the hospital, where a CT scan revealed multiple blood clots of unknown origin in her brain.
Her condition quickly deteriorated, and soon doctors concluded that she had no chance of recovery: the woman was brain dead.
However, Emory doctors told the family that they could not remove the patient from the life-sustaining machine because it would constitute a termination of her current pregnancy – something that is strictly illegal in the state of Georgia if more than six weeks have passed since conception.
At the same time, back then, in February, doctors warned the woman’s mother that, in connection with what had happened, it was possible that her grandson might be born blind, unable to walk normally, or even simply not viable.
The Abortion Debate in the US
Republican state leader Brian Kemp signed a near-total ban on abortion in 2019.
However, the law only went into effect after the US Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that effectively stripped American women of their guaranteed constitutional right to abortion.
For abortion rights advocates, Smith's story is just one more in a long line of stories made possible by abortion bans in conservative states.
As the liberal Atlantic writes, from a philosophical point of view, all of these cases are simply a reflection of what abortion advocates consider the indisputable basis for their policies in this area: that women's bodies and lives are nothing more than consumables, intended solely for the production of children.
And as Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson notes in the New York Times, “Reproductive justice advocates have long understood that abortion law is never about abortion alone. It’s about exercising control over all pregnant women — whether or not they plan to carry their pregnancies to term.”
