Adriana Smith: Pregnant Brain-Dead Woman To Remain Alive To Give Birth
In a state where reproductive rights are under siege, a devastating tragedy highlights the real-life consequences of extremist legislation.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother, registered nurse, and proud Atlantan, has been declared brain dead for more than 90 days. She’s not in a coma. She’s not recovering. She is gone. But under Georgia’s abortion law, her body is still being kept alive by machines, not because there’s hope she’ll wake up, but because she was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered a catastrophic medical emergency. And now, the law demands that her body remain a vessel for a fetus—stripping her and her family of all decision-making power.
This is what it looks like when a government values potential life more than actual life. And let’s be honest: it’s what happens when women are denied full autonomy over their bodies.
Georgia’s “Heartbeat Bill,” also known as the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, bans abortions after roughly six weeks, before most people even know they’re pregnant. The law went into effect after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and its implications have proven catastrophic. Adriana’s case isn’t some far-fetched scenario; it’s the real-life fallout of a cruel and rigid policy that leaves no room for nuance, compassion, or even basic humanity.
Let’s walk through what happened.
In February, Adriana began experiencing severe headaches. She sought medical attention. She did everything right. But she was sent home without a CT scan. The next morning, her boyfriend found her struggling to breathe. She was rushed back to the hospital and declared brain-dead after doctors discovered multiple blood clots in her brain.
That’s when the nightmare truly began.
Because Adriana was pregnant, doctors said they were legally required to keep her on life support until the fetus could survive outside of her body. Her family has been forced to watch her be artificially sustained, not for healing, but for gestation. Her young son, her grieving mother, and her entire support system has endured over three months of retraumatization, all while carrying the financial burden of a growing mountain of medical expenses.
To make matters worse, reports indicate the fetus has fluid on the brain. Its future health is uncertain. But under Georgia law, that doesn’t matter.
What matters is control.
As Adriana’s mother, April Newkirk, stated plainly: “This decision should’ve been left to us.” But it wasn’t. And that’s the point.
The fall of Roe v. Wade was never just about abortion; it was about eroding trust in women’s ability to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. It was about prioritizing ideology over lived experience. It was about granting the state the final say over people’s bodies, regardless of circumstance, regardless of suffering. It was about acknowledging that life, motherhood, pregnancy, and loss are complicated—and that no government has the right to force a woman’s body into servitude, even in death.
The decision to carry a pregnancy to term should never be mandated by law. Not in cases of rape. Not in cases of severe medical complications. And certainly not in cases where the pregnant person is no longer alive to participate in that decision.
Adriana deserves dignity in death. Her family deserves the right to grieve, to make the best decision they can in an impossible situation, to begin healing, but instead, they’re trapped in a living nightmare—watching hospital bills pile up, facing the unknown fate of a child who may be born severely disabled, and having no say in any of it.
This is not pro-life. This is state-sanctioned torture.
And this is why we must talk about Roe. Not just as a legal precedent, but as a moral one. The right to choose is about more than terminating a pregnancy—it’s about reclaiming ownership of our bodies, our futures, our lives. It’s about trusting women to make hard choices without interference from lawmakers who don’t know our names, our stories, or our struggles.
In response to the tragic news, the Atlanta-based Reproductive Justice organization SisterSong has released the following statement:
It is deadly to be Black and pregnant in a state where reproductive care is limited and criminalized. Nearly half of Georgia’s counties are reproductive care deserts, all while looming Medicaid cuts threaten to worsen access to care. Adriana Smith was a mother, daughter, and nurse who deserved a healthy pregnancy. Like so many Black women, Adriana spoke up for herself. She expressed what she felt in her body, and as a health care provider, she knew how to navigate the medical system. She was declared brain dead after doctors found multiple blood clots, but by then, it was already too late. Because of Adriana’s pregnancy and Georgia’s abortion ban, her family was told that doctors must keep Adriana on life support until the fetus is viable outside of the womb.
First, Adriana deserved to be trusted by her health care professionals. Second, her family deserved the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions. Instead, they have endured over 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing.
Black women must be trusted when it comes to our health care decisions. Our safety and our lives are sacrificed when essential care is out of reach, criminalized, and our bodies are left in the hands of extremist legislators. We’ve sounded the alarm for years. Yet, 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. Our bodies are not battlegrounds for political power plays. At SisterSong, we remain resolved in our fight for Reproductive Justice so no family has to go through this pain. Our hearts are with Adriana Smith’s family as they grieve this unimaginable loss.”
— Monica Simpson, Executive Director of SisterSong
Adriana Smith deserved better. Her family deserves better. We all deserve better.
So let’s call this what it is: a failure of policy, a failure of compassion, and a warning of what happens when laws ignore the lived realities of the people they affect. We cannot allow our sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends to be reduced to vessels—especially not in death.
This is more than a policy failure. It’s a moral one. A human one. It is the result of lawmakers legislating from ideology rather than empathy, from control rather than care. If we can legally deny a family the right to bury their daughter in peace, we must ask ourselves: what can’t they do to us next?
This is not freedom. This is not justice.
This is why we fight.
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