Adriana Smith, a brain-dead Georgia woman who was forced to spend months on life support because she was pregnant, has been taken off of it after delivering a baby last week, her family told NBC affiliate 11 Alive.
Smith’s case is a stark example of the consequences of Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban, which bars most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically around six weeks of gestation. Although Smith, a 31-year-old nurse, was declared brain dead in February, physicians would not remove her from life support because they feared running afoul of the Georgia law, her mother, April Newkirk, previously said. When Smith went to the hospital in February, she was roughly nine weeks pregnant.
Emory University Hospital, where Smith was being treated, told the Associated Press that it made decisions about her care based on “consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance,” and provided “individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”
Newkirk, reproductive rights advocates and lawmakers have denounced how Smith was treated, emphasizing that she and her family were deprived the right to determine what happened to her. “I’m not saying we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy. What I’m saying is we should have had a choice,” Newkirk said in May.
“She was systematically dehumanized, and her family’s choice about a deeply personal, medical decision about their loved one was taken away from them by anti-abortion politicians,” Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a reproductive rights advocacy group, told JS in a statement.
Smith’s baby, Chance, was delivered on June 13 via Cesarean section, weighing 1 pound and 13 ounces. He’s now being treated in the neonatal intensive care unit at Emory, according to Newkirk.
Smith’s experience has highlighted the ambiguity and harms that stringent abortion bans have introduced. Georgia’s ban, the LIFE Act, was signed into law in 2019, but it didn’t go into effect until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr has stated that the law does not bar physicians from taking someone off life support, as in Smith’s case. State Sen. Ed Setzler, the Republican legislator who sponsored the bill, however, supported the hospital’s actions. Emory likely made the decisions it did to avoid liability, experts said.
“It is not clear what exactly the law prescribes and permits in cases like this,” Khiara M. Bridges, a University of California, Berkeley law professor, told JS. “In an abundance of caution, risk-averse doctors and hospital counsel will do exactly what they did in Smith’s case.”
The Georgia attorney general’s opinion that the anti-abortion law wouldn’t apply in cases like Smith’s would not shield physicians from legal ramifications, experts noted.
“ The attorney general isn’t the architect of the law,” University of California, Davis law professor Mary Ziegler told JS. “So all he’s really telling you is that he wouldn’t prosecute Emory for abortion if they did that. But he’s not the only one who has the authority to do something like that.”
Abortion bans have had devastating effects as physicians have struggled to navigate the legal gray area associated with these laws. In the case of 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman in Georgia, for instance, ProPublica reported that she died after physicians delayed her care. Although the state has an exception for procedures performed to address medical emergencies, physicians may wait too long to act, the publication reported.
“All women should have a choice about their body,” Newkirk previously said. “I want people to know that.”
