Early last February, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse who was nine weeks pregnant, started experiencing severe headaches. Her worsening condition, April Newkirk, her mother, says, was not taken seriously by doctors at the neighborhood hospital.
“They prescribed her some medication, but they didn’t even do any tests. No CT scan,” Newkirk explained to 11Alive. “If they had done that or hospitalized her overnight, they would have caught it. It could’ve been avoided.”
The following morning, Smith’s boyfriend woke to find her not breathing, gurgling and gasping for air as she lay asleep. She was immediately taken back to the hospital, where a CT scan detected numerous brain clots. Doctors readied themselves for surgery, but it was too late. Smith was brain dead.
But three months on, Smith is still on life support thanks to Georgia’s new abortion law, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act. Passed in 2019 but not implemented until 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the law prohibits abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be heard, usually at around six weeks.
Exceptions are granted only in rape, incest, lethal fetal anomaly, or a medical emergency putting the woman at risk of dying or serious harm to her health. But Smith’s case resides in a zone of ambiguity her brain death has prompted doctors to declare her no longer an emergency medical patient, so abortion under the law cannot be obtained.
“She’s been breathing through machines over 90 days,” Newkirk said. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son, I bring him to see her.”
Her infant grandson also persists in thinking his mom is “just sleeping,” Newkirk reported. Physicians now intend to maintain Smith on life support for 32 weeks of pregnancy about 11 weeks from now in the hope the baby will live outside the uterus.
“They want to get the baby to at least 32 weeks,” she said. “But each passing day, it’s more expense, more trauma, more questions.”
Newkirk feels the choice regarding her daughter’s care should have rested on the family. “I believe every woman should be able to make her own decision,” she said. “And if not that, then their partner or their parents.”
“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she added. “This decision should’ve been left to us. Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have and we’re going to be the ones raising him.”
