“. . . [W]e should have had a choice"

Georgia's Abortion Law Kept Adriana Smith, a Black Woman, on Life Support Despite Brain Death to Incubate her Nine-Week-Old Fetus. After her Baby Was Born Premature, She Was Removed from Life Support.

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Adriana Smith with her seven-year-old son Chase. Photo courtesy of Smith’s GoFundMe

For centuries, Black women have been dehumanized and objectified. Adriana Smith, a Registered Nurse who worked at Emory University Hospital, is the latest example of this. Though brain dead, doctors put and kept her on life support to incubate her a nine-week-old fetus.

Last week she was finally taken off life support after her baby Chance was born by emergency C-section. Smith’s mother April Newkirk in an interview with Atlanta’s WXAI discusses how Chance is doing in the NICU and how the family is doing after this ghoulish medical intervention.

Please watch Newkirk’s interview below.

Doctors at Georgia’s Emory University Hospital told Newkirk that her daughter needed to be kept on life support so they did not violate the state’s abortion ban that makes abortion illegal after detection of fetal heartbeat can be detected at six weeks and after.

Broadwaybabyto

, who writes on disability and disability justice on her Substack The Disabled Ginger, has repeatedly pointed out on her Notes account the misogynoir Smith faced. Misogynoir and racism against Black men have been part of medicine in the United States for centuries.

Obstetrics and gynecology only advanced because a white medical doctor used enslaved Black women without their consent for his experiments. Many of those experiments did not use anesthesia.

The same happened with Smith. Before and even after Smith’s case, Black women’s health, Black maternal health and Black infant health has been neglected in U.S. medical schools and by U.S. medical doctors. As Newkirk said in the WXAI interview after Chase was delivered, though herself a Registered Nurse, Smith encountered systemic medical racism against Black women when another Georgia hospital sent her home with just pills after she went to the ER with excruciating headaches.

Twenty-four hours later, Smith went into brain death. Essentially her son Chance gestated in a dead body with only her organs kept alive by medical technology.

I concur with

Broadwaybabyto

that Smith was used as a medical experiment to demonstrate women can be used as incubators when they are hospitalized or are brain dead. It underscores that the health of the fetus remains more important and reduces the woman to a simple vessel.

Back in May, Newkirk told WXAI, “"My grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk . . . , we don't know if he'll live once she has him. It should have been left up to the family. Because I’m in my 50s, [and h]er dad is in his 50s . . . we’re going to have the responsibility with her partner to raise her sons. And I'm not saying we would have chose[n] to terminate her pregnancy. What I'm saying is we should have had a choice."

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe vs. Wade three years ago. Justice Samuel Alito wrote SCOTUS’s decision that reads as laughable even by non-lawyers. In it, Alito stated that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and cited an English 13th century law as one of his legal supports.

While states like my state of Illinois still provide abortion care, Georgia’s “Heartbeat Law,” AKA Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, made Emory’s doctors afraid of violating it. Even Catholic News Agency published an online article quoting the office of Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr, “There is nothing in the LIFE act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death.”

As ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles proved, the women who would be the first and most harshly impacted by Dobbs would be Black and brown women. The Dobbs decision is not just misogynist, but it’s also racist. Only Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented.

You can donate to Adriana Smith’s GoFundMe here.