What If This Was Your Daughter?

We must talk about Adriana Smith in Georgia

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Imagine your daughter is 30 years old. She’s a nurse. A mom. For three decades she’s been your own beating heart outside of your body. One day she gets a headache so bad she goes to the ER. They send her home. They don’t run the necessary tests. The next day, her boyfriend finds her unresponsive. A cascade of blood clots has killed her. She is brain dead. Legally, medically, irreversibly gone.

But she’s also nine weeks pregnant.

You are standing in an ICU room, holding the hand of your dead daughter, and being told you cannot take her off life support. Because of a heartbeat. Not her heartbeat, but the flicker of fetal cardiac activity that Georgia law recognizes as life. A law that even hospital officials say offers no gray area, no compassion, no context.

A law that treats your daughter’s body as an incubator. And you, her grieving family, as irrelevant.

Adriana Smith’s family is living this nightmare. It’s a terrible dream that her mother April Newkirk cannot wake up from.

Adriana was declared brain dead in February. Yet, seemingly because of Georgia’s abortion ban, a “heartbeat law” that went into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Emory University Hospital has kept her on life support for more than three months. Not to save her life. But to try and keep her then non-viable nine-week-old fetus alive long enough to deliver. The fetus is now around 21 weeks, and doctors plan to do a c-section in August. Doctors have said that while the fetus is growing there are worries about serious conditions.

Adriana’s mother April Newkirk told WXIA that doctors told the family that the fetus has fluid on the brain and that they’re concerned about his health.

“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” Newkirk said.

Let’s be clear: Adriana is dead and the state has taken control, not of her medical care, but of her corpse. The Georgia law does have an exception for abortions to save the life of the mother, but Adriana was already dead from blood clots in her brain when the decision had to be made.

This is not a dystopian novel. This is not a story pulled from America’s history of forcing black women “into involuntary reproductive servitude for the benefit of other people and not for them” as Michele Goodwin said on her recent podcast. This is simply America, right now and I don’t think this story is getting nearly enough attention. I keep bringing it up to friends and some of them have only just heard about it or haven’t heard about it at all. In a news cycle that is hellacious every single day things are getting lost in the void, and Adriana’s story is one of them.

We must amplify her story because she no longer has a voice.

During Donald’s Trump campaign, we heard a lot about sending the decisions about abortion back to the states. This is what it looks like when states make these decisions. The Georgia Attorney General’s office said that their interpretation of the law does not require keeping a pregnant patient on life support “after brain death.” But state Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican and sponsor of the 2019 abortion law, said the hospital was “acting appropriately,” according to the AP.

State Sen. Ed Setzler (R-Ga.) who sponsored Georgia’s six-week abortion ban told PBS, “I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child. I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.”

According to Ms. other lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates are sounding alarms about the tragic case.

“Adriana’s story is gut-wrenching,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.). “It’s also a painful reminder of the consequences when politicians refuse to trust us to make our own medical decisions.”

Monica Simpson, executive director of reproductive justice organization SisterSong, said “[Smith’s] family deserves the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions. Instead, they have endured 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing.” SisterSong is the lead plaintiff in the current lawsuit SisterSong v. State of Georgia challenging Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.

“Black women must be trusted when it comes to our healthcare decisions,” Simpson said in her statement. “After the devastating and preventable deaths of multiple Black women, the message still rings clear: Our lives are on the line, and our human right to bodily autonomy has been violated.”

But the thing about abortion bans is that the exceptions to the norm define the landscape. The 10 year old rape victim who had to leave Ohio to access care. The slippery slope of fetal personhood isn’t slippery anymore, it’s a sheet of ice. And women, families, nurses, doctors are skidding across it into hell.

This is about more than abortion. This is about consent. It’s about who gets to decide what happens to your body. It’s about a mother being forced to watch her dead daughter’s body artificially kept breathing because of a law that treats potential life as more sacred than actual life.

Some legal experts say Georgia law might not require this. But the hospital fears legal repercussions. So here we are.

And if you're thinking, “Well this is tragic, but rare,” ask yourself: How rare do you need it to be before you care?

Because here’s the truth: it could be your daughter. It could be your sister. Your wife. Your best friend. A car accident. A seizure. An undetected clot. One missed diagnosis. And suddenly, she’s not a person anymore. She’s a vessel.

Maybe you are in a blue state, and don’t think this affects your life, but the national specter of fetal personhood looms large in our collective consciousness. (See my thoughts about that, here.)

I often think about the majority decision written by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade. In it, he takes great effort to defend himself on attacks from the Dissent, that by overturning Roe he is opening the floodgates to overturning other fundamental rights decided under the same legal logic, the rights to contraception and marriage equality. “The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a “potential life,” but an abortion has that effect,” he writes. What we know of the conservative majority today, most especially Justice Alito, is that it is a group of people who can justify blatantly political acts with legal jargon. If they enact constitutional fetal personhood, who is to say what protecting “potential life” can grow to entail? Women using drugs have already been held in jail in Alabama to protect their fetuses. Students for life classifies IUDs as abortifacients. Why wouldn’t contraception be seen as preventing potential life?

This is about Adriana Smith's life. But it isn’t just about what’s happening in Georgia. It’s about what we allow to happen anywhere. It’s about whether we believe women are human beings deserving of full autonomy, or if we believe that always comes secondary to that as being a body that holds a womb.

So ask yourself: What if this was your daughter?

Because if we don’t fight now, one day it might be.

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What can you do?

• Restack this story or share it with friends. Make sure that people know Adriana’s name and what is currently happening to her. When I mention this to people I pull up the many stories about it and show them her picture. The reactions are always shock and disbelief. We need everyone to know about what is happening and how this is the result of Republican policies.

• If you can afford to, consider donating to April Newkirk’s GoFundMe. Despite their inability to make decisions regarding Adriana’s body they may still be responsible for the medical costs.

• Listen to and share Ms. magazine’s emergency podcast episode with Dr. Michele Goodwin, scholar and author of Policing the Womb.

P.S. Recently, I’ve seen other accounts parrot an anti-choice talking point (see it circulated by the anti-choice group Live Action, here, five days ago) that the heartbeat bill is not responsible. They claim that it was a GA advanced directives law, not the abortion ban, causing this horrific situation. But my reading of GA Code § 31-32-9 is that it just says where there is a woman pregnant with a non-viable fetus AND she lacks an advanced directive, physicians must provide a written certification of the “state of permanent unconsciousness” and then make efforts to consult with next of kin regarding use of life-sustaining procedures. In this case, Adriana’s mother has been very public that she has not been able to make the choice.

Emory healthcare has released a statement about the decision which includes express reference to the abortion ban, “Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”