Three months ago, 30-year-old Adriana Smith was declared brain-dead. But a hospital in Georgia is keeping her “alive” on life support, against her family’s wishes, because of the state’s strict abortion ban.
Smith, a registered nurse in metro Atlanta, was nine weeks pregnant in early February when she started suffering from intense headaches. Smith initially sought treatment at Northside Hospital but was released that same day after being given medication. According to Adriana Smith’s mother April Newkirk, “They didn’t do any tests. No CT scan. If they had done that or kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented.”
Abortion is currently illegal in Georgia after six weeks. And even though ending Smith’s life support would not be an abortion, hospital staff say they plan to keep Smith’s dead body on life-support machines until the fetus reaches a gestational age when it can survive outside the womb.
When she died, Adriana Smith was already a mother to one young son. Doctors told Newkirk and her boyfriend that, legally, they aren’t allowed to consider other options while Smith is technically pregnant, even though her family wishes she could be allowed to die in peace.
“She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” Smith’s mother Newkirk 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.”
This is fucking ghoulish, but if you tried to show this story to the average Republican voter, they’d tell you “oh that’s not real, they aren’t doing that. That’s fake news meant to scare you”
When I was a kid there was a big lawsuit about a brain dead woman whose husband wanted to take her off life support, but her parents didn’t. Fifteen years passed from the time she went into a coma to when she was finally allowed to die.
That was only twenty years ago