The Family Of Adriana Smith, The Legally Dead Woman Still On Life Support So That Doctors Can Deliver Her Baby, Said It’s Traumatizing

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The Family Of Adriana Smith, The Legally Dead Woman Still On Life Support So That Doctors Can Deliver Her Baby, Said It’s Traumatizing

Note: This article contains mention of medical abuse and loss of life, including that of an infant.

Adriana Smith is a 30-year-old ****** nurse and mother in Georgia. She was about nine weeks pregnant with a boy in February when her boyfriend woke up to her gasping for air in her sleep and

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.

Her mother told the media that her daughter had sought treatment at Northside Hospital the previous night and was released after being administered medication, but no CT scans or other tests.

Smith was taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta “with severe head pains,” according to

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. “A CT scan showed blood clots in her brain, and soon physicians declared Smith to be brain-dead.” She has now been on life support for over 90 days.

Anadolu / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The murky legality around this centers on Georgia’s LIFE Act, a law banning most abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy once “fetal cardiac activity can be detected” — aka Georgia’s heartbeat law. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in 2019, but it was only

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once Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022.

Officials seem to be in disagreement about the interpretation of the law, though. The office of the Georgia Attorney General issued a statement

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, “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.” However, Ed Setzler, a Republican state senator who sponsored the 2019 bill, said he thinks it’s “completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child […] 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.”

Medical staff at Emory, where Adriana Smith worked, have been ignoring the wishes of her family in favor of the law, which leaves a glaring gray area in the case of a legally dead mother.

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Brynn Anderson / AP

Brain death is “the legal and medical

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for death in the United States.”

Smith’s mother and family have expressed that they’ve had virtually no say in her medical care or that of her fetus. “She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” her mother

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. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son — I bring him to see her.”

The family has reportedly been by her side every day since she was admitted to the hospital. Smith’s young son reportedly thinks his mother is just sleeping.

According to Atlanta television station WXIA-TV, “The plan now is to keep Smith alive until doctors believe the baby can survive outside the womb — likely at 32 weeks gestation.” That would mean 10 more weeks on life support; Smith’s family said doctors have told them there are no other legal ways to proceed. “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,” Smith’s mother said.

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She told WXIA-TV that the family is concerned about the health of Smith’s baby, as doctors have told them he has fluid on the brain. “[Adriana] is pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” Smith’s mother said.

Many people have taken to social media to express their outrage over the anti-abortion legal and medical system that has allowed Adriana Smith to be kept alive by machines for the sake of preserving her pregnancy.

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“I’m the mother of a brain-dead son whose organs were donated,” said TikTok user Jennifer Comstock (

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) in a

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earlier this week. “People need to understand what it’s like to keep a brain-dead body alive.” She goes on to explain that it took time for the hospital to stabilize and prepare his organs for donation and to find suitable recipients because of his blood type.

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“So I sat in that hospital bed with him for two days, because despite the fact that he was legally dead, that was my baby, and I wasn’t leaving him in that hospital alone,” she says.

“During that two days, the amount of interventions they had to do to keep my son’s body was unbelievable,” Comstock says. “Obviously, he was on a ventilator, but you also can’t regulate your own heartbeat. You can’t maintain your own blood pressure. They’re giving you all kinds of medications […] His kidneys were failing. They had to give him medication to fix that.”

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She goes on: “They would fix one thing, and another thing would go wrong. And sitting there watching it felt wrong. It was horrible watching what they were doing to him.”

But, as Comstock says, there’s one major difference between the case of her 30-year-old son and that of Adriana Smith: “My son wanted to be an organ donor, and that is why we continued to do it. And my son saved lives,” she said. “But I don’t think you guys understand. This woman is not in a vegetative state; she’s not in a coma. She’s dead.”

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“Her body is not functioning. Her brain is not producing the hormones required to sustain a pregnancy.”

“This family is being put to torture. I did this of my own free will, and I am still traumatized,” she concludes.

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People replied to the video in droves. This person wrote about how having a body that is technically “alive” is only one part of the equation in a healthy pregnancy.

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Someone else echoed what Jennifer said in the video about the crucial difference in having the choice to be kept on life support; she replied, “Pregnant Georgia women seem to belong to the state not to them selves.”

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