In a story drawing comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, a Georgia woman has spent over three months on life support—not for her own survival, but to sustain the pregnancy she was carrying when she was declared brain dead.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse and mother from Atlanta, was just under nine weeks pregnant in early February when she was diagnosed with blood clots in her brain. Tragically, she soon lost all brain function and has since been kept alive by machines under Georgia’s restrictive abortion law.
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Smith’s decline began with severe headaches. According to her mother, April Newkirk, Adriana sought treatment at Northside Hospital but was sent home with medication and no diagnostic scans, like a CT. “If they had done that or kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented,” Newkirk told WXIA-TV. By the following morning, Adriana gasped for breath in her sleep. Her boyfriend, alarmed by the choking, gargling sounds, called 911. She was rushed to Emory Decatur Hospital and later transferred to Emory University Hospital—her own place of work—where doctors attempted to relieve pressure on her brain.
Those efforts came too late. Smith was declared brain dead, but her pregnancy, just beginning its second trimester, complicated everything.
Georgia’s controversial “heartbeat law,” which bans most abortions after cardiac activity is detected in a fetus (around six weeks gestation), is at the center of this heartbreaking case. Under this law, a fetus is granted legal personhood once a heartbeat is detected. According to Smith’s family, doctors told them they are legally bound to keep her on life support until the fetus reaches 32 weeks—viable enough to be delivered via cesarean section.
Smith is currently 21 weeks pregnant. That means her body may remain on life-sustaining machinery for over two more months—without brain activity, without hope of recovery—simply to bring her fetus to term.
April Newkirk, while mourning her daughter, now finds herself entangled in a politically charged legal and medical battle. “They asked me if I would agree to a procedure to relieve the pressure, and I said yes,” she recalled. “Then they called me back and said they couldn’t do it.” No one seems to be able to give her a clear answer as to why—except that the law may prevent doctors from ending life support until the fetus can survive outside the womb.
To many, Adriana Smith’s case is not just a tragedy—it’s a chilling glimpse into what life under abortion bans can look like. A woman who is no longer alive is being used as an incubator, her family powerless to act on what they believe she would have wanted. Her mother, a grief-stricken figure caught in a legal maze, is left not only mourning her daughter but waiting in limbo for the birth of a grandchild under harrowing circumstances.
As Georgia continues to enforce one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, Adriana Smith’s story may serve as a watershed moment in how Americans understand the human cost of legislation that places the rights of a fetus above the rights—and lives—of women.
While the law may demand viability, her family is left asking a deeper question: at what cost?
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