ATLANTA — Adriana Smith, the Georgia mother who was declared brain-dead in February, delivered her baby via cesarian section Friday evening at an Atlanta-area hospital. The newborn, named Chance, weighed in at one pound, 13 ounces. He is in the neonatal intensive care unit.
April Newkirk, Adriana’s mother, told Atlanta’s NBC News affiliate 11Alive that her daughter was about six months into her pregnancy. Smith was taken off of life support on Tuesday.
Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she began suffering excruciating headaches. She was admitted to an Atlanta-area hospital and given medication but no tests. She then was sent home. The next morning, she struggled to breathe as she slept, her boyfriend said. She was then admitted to Emory University Hospital Midtown, where she underwent a CT scan and doctors determined she suffered from blood clots.
Case affected by Georgia reproductive law
Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, written in 2019, bans most abortions the moment “a detectable human heartbeat” is present. Cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in cells within an embryo that will become the heart. That process could take place as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before many pregnancies are detected.
Georgia’s six-week abortion ban also established fetal personhood. Fetal personhood is the concept that embryos and fetuses are people and have legal rights. As a result, Georgia residents can even claim a fetus as a dependent on their state taxes.
Despite the law, Smith’s ordeal was not necessary, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said in a statement.
“There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death,” Carr’s statement read. “Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.”
Carr’s statement, however, does not address the ambiguity interpreted by Emory and doctors around the state.
Doctors can be prosecuted if they run afoul of the law and potentially lose their licenses.
Democrats continue to raise ethical questions
Many OB-GYNs have warned the state law interferes with patient care. Georgia has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the United States. Moreover, Black women are more than twice as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Ga., who was a state senator when the LIFE Act was enacted, has drafted a federal bill pushing the U.S. government to reaffirm and guarantee autonomy and dignity to pregnant people over their lives, well-being, and medical needs. It also would repeal state laws that ban or criminalize abortion and abortion-related services. Plus the legislation would repeal laws that exclude pregnant people from having their advance directives come into effect. Lastly, it clarifies how anti-abortion and fetal personhood laws should be interpreted in medical settings.
“From my service in the State Senate when the LIFE Act was passed in 2019, I know that the bill was drafted in a way that created uncertainty among medical providers and my constituents in Georgia’s 5th District about what is permitted under the law and how the law would be enforced,” Williams said in a statement. “The clear intention of this was to create a chilling effect on doctors providing essential maternal healthcare services and on patients seeking lifesaving medical treatment. We are now seeing this lack of clarity result in unimaginable cruelty to Adriana Smith and her family.”
U.S. Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Sara Jacobs are co-sponsors on the bill.
Newkirk, launched a GoFundMe page to help pay her daughter’s mounting medical bills. So far, the campaign has raised $162,203, nearly 58% of the $275,000 goal.
The Atlanta Voice is a BNV partner. The original version of this story appeared here.
