Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse and mother from Georgia, was declared brain-dead in February after suffering a medical emergency while about nine weeks pregnant. Even though that means she is legally dead, doctors at Emory University Hospital have kept her on life support in an effort to sustain the fetus to at least 32 weeks, telling her family that they are “legally required to keep Smith breathing until the fetus reaches viability,” as the Louisiana Illuminator described.
This decision seemingly has been driven by Georgia's strict abortion laws, which ban terminating a pregnancy once “fetal cardiac activity can be detected, or roughly six weeks into pregnancy.”
The office of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has said the abortion law does not require “medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death.” Some have instead claimed the governing factor in Smith’s case is Georgia’s Advance Directive for Health Care Act which restricts “doctors from withdrawing life support from a pregnant patient unless the fetus is nonviable and the patient had a written directive explicitly requesting such action."
But hospital staff apparently based their action on the abortion law, citing it in explaining their decision to Smith’s mother, she said. The hospital has declined to publicly comment on the specific case, citing privacy rules.
Some health experts say Smith’s circumstances have illuminated the way restrictive abortion laws are failing patients and health care providers
Steve Ralston, director of the maternal fetal medicine division at George Washington University, explained to The Washington Post that “laws that have removed patient autonomy when they are pregnant” have made it unclear “who we are making decisions for.”
He also argued that “the chances of there being a healthy newborn at the end of this is very, very small.”
University of California, Davis, law professor Mary Ziegler also told NPR that doctors and health care professionals are more risk-averse in states with restrictive abortion laws, as there can be criminal liabilities for treatment.
Ziegler said, “This scenario in Georgia right now is an example of that where you have the attorney general who says, ‘No problem, go ahead,’ and you have doctors and their lawyers reading the law and saying, ‘We're not so sure.’”
Anti-abortion groups are “looking away or shirking blame” when confronted with such stories
Anti-abortion groups have repeatedly undermined reports of patients who reportedly became victims of their states’ restrictive abortion laws.
After ProPublica published stories of women in Georgia and Texas who died following delayed treatment in states with strict abortion laws, anti-abortion groups attacked the reports as a “complete lie” and claimed the women did not die due to abortion bans, instead pinning their deaths on “medical malpractice” and “neglect.” In fact, two women in Texas died after failing to get proper treatment post-miscarriage under the state’s abortion ban, and a woman in Georgia died after doctors waited 20 hours to perform a dilation and curettage. This may have been due to Georgia’s recent ban on the procedure, as CBS News reported that doctors in states with restrictive abortion laws have voiced concerns over “losing their medical license or being prosecuted if they break the law.”
Substack author Jessica Valenti explained the anti-abortion groups’ strategy toward these kinds of stories as “either looking away or shirking blame.” She wrote:
