By the time she ended up at a Georgia hospital with emergency complications, 30-year-old Atlanta nurse Adriana Smith was almost nine weeks pregnant.
Her condition, which included multiple blood clots, deteriorated as doctors tried to save her life, Smith’s mother April Newkirk told Atlanta TV station WXIA.They did a CT scan and she had blood clots all in her head. So they had asked me if they could do a procedure to relieve them, and I said yes,” Newkirk said. “And then they called me back and said that they couldn’t do it.”
She said doctors declared Smith ‘brain dead’ and put her on life support without consulting her.
“It’s torture for me,” Newkirk said. “I come here and I see my daughter breathing by the ventilator, but she’s not there.”That was more than three months ago. Smith is still pregnant.
“And I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy,” Newkirk said, “but what I’m saying is we should have had a choice.”
Except for an emailed statement, Emory Healthcare isn’t commenting on the case.
“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,” the statement said. “Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.”
Georgia’s law H.B. 481, also known as the LIFE Act, passed in 2019. It went into effect shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs ruling on June 24, 2022.
The law bans abortion after the point at which an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo. Typically this is about six weeks into pregnancy.
It also gives Smith’s fetus the same rights as a person. The law says “unborn children are a class of living, distinct persons” and explains that the state of Georgia recognizes “the benefits of providing full legal recognition to an unborn child.”
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Did fetal ‘personhood’ mean life support was required?
Twenty states now ban abortion at or before 18 weeks’ gestation; 13 of those have a near-total ban on all abortions with very limited exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research group that supports abortion rights.
Like Georgia, some of these states built their abortion restrictions around the legal concept of ‘personhood,’ thus conferring legal rights and protections on an embryo or fetus during pregnancy.
Smith’s case represents a major test of how this type of law will be applied in certain medical situations. Despite being unified in their opposition to abortion, conservatives and politicians do not always agree on the scope of the law in cases like Smith’s.
For example, Georgia’s Republican Attorney General Chris Carr doesn’t think the law restricts the options in Smith’s care, so removing her from life support wouldn’t be equivalent to aborting the fetus.
“There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death. Removing life support is not an action ‘with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy,'” Carr said in a statement.
But Republican Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, who authored the LIFE Act, disagrees. Emory’s doctors acted appropriately when they put Smith on life support, he told the Associated Press.
“I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child,” Setzler told the AP. “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.”
Personhood energizes anti-abortion movement
“The problem is that Georgia’s law isn’t just an abortion ban, it’s a ‘personhood’ law declaring that a fetus or embryo is a person, that an ‘unborn child,’ as the law puts it, is a person,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California-Davis and author of “Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction.”
Source:Npr.Org
