Where is the line drawn for the safety and consideration of women with the rise of regressive abortion laws? There seems to be a lack of any drawn clearly enough. On June 13th, the baby of Adriana Smith, who was pronounced brain dead over four months ago, was delivered via emergency C-section in Georgia at Emory University Hospital.

In February, Smith, who was nine weeks pregnant, reported a series of headaches, but she hadn’t received further testing or scans. According to ABC News, her boyfriend woke up to her gasping for air. Hours later, after being transported from Emory Decatur to Emory University Hospital, she was declared brain dead. Her body was then kept on a ventilator, despite her overall condition.

Why was she kept alive?

Due to Georgia’s personhood, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and Smith’s nine-week pregnancy, Emory University Hospital stated they were required to keep Smith on the ventilators. 

This situation goes all the way back to 2019, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law the LIFE Act. According to a NIH study, most women do not know they are pregnant, or have “pregnancy recognition,” until after 7 weeks. Some women can not know they are pregnant until up to 20 weeks. However, the LIFE Act bans abortions once a heartbeat is detected, which usually occurs at six weeks. Women aren’t given the choice to have an abortion once that happens, despite them possibly not having the physical, mental, or financial circumstances to carry and raise a child safely. Smith was brain-dead, with no ability to protest her situation.

The 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which originally granted the federal right to have an abortion, also contributed to the decision by Emory University Hospital to keep Smith on ventilators. The LIFE Act was originally blocked, but was reinstated once the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe.

How could this happen?

The landmark Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a testament to the movement pushing for stronger control over abortion. This movement to remove abortion’s enshrined status as a right was abrupt, even though Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed. Presently, the Pew Centre reports that the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, and that this change can be attributed to the current rise in conservatism. Right-leaning voters mention “family values” and reducing promiscuity as reasons for why they wish to remove abortion, thinking this would serve as the motivator for women to become more traditional, religious and marriage-oriented. 

Many ethicists have opined on their views on abortion, and more specifically on the right to have an abortion. These views differ again when we look at the stages of a pregnancy and if a pregnant woman has an equally valid right to abortion during each stage of her pregnancy. 

Celia Wolf-Devine from Stonehill College, a Catholic institution, explored contemporary society’s emphasis on the virtue of inclusion and the vice of exclusion. She claims that the call for inclusion emphasises the need to pay special attention to the more vulnerable members of society, who can easily be treated as non-persons in society’s commerce. She argued that our national practice of abortion, comparatively one of the most extreme in terms of legal permissiveness, is contradictory to the good of inclusion. Why? Because by classifying a fetus as a non-human, we witness extreme legal permissiveness to exclude them from life by condemning an entire category of human beings to death, often on the slightest of grounds. “There is something contradictory in a society that claims to be welcoming and protective of the vulnerable but that shows a callous indifference to the fate of human beings before the moment of birth…” writes America Magazine. It is posited that the exclusion of caring for a fetus is to turn away from protecting one of the most vulnerable, under the assumption that of course, the fetus embodies personhood, consciousness and the act of abortion to protect a mother's bodily autonomy is a harmful act to the fetus with equal measure of harm done.

In this case, it cannot be stated that Georgia would have shown callous indifference, given she is non-consenting. Being brain-dead would mean never being able to show conscious feeling, emotion, choice or movement. Yet, they keep her body alive as the law has stated her body’s functions serve a purpose in keeping a fetus alive. The moral right to life is being upheld for the fetus, at the expense of a moral grievance of keeping a forever-unconscious individual alive. 

In “A Defense of Abortion”, Judith Jarvis Thomson states that the right to life can never be equated, or cause one to be entitled to the right to use another person’s body to live. Georgia being kept on a ventilator is a sign that the fetus’s right to life was being placed above her own, despite the fetus never being able to keep itself alive. 

Family opinions and fetal law—what can be done next?

Adriana Smith has now been taken off life support and is officially declared “dead”. 

Typically, for cases such as Smith, in which she was brain dead, the choice to end life falls on other family members if advanced directive papers are not available. According to Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, "There's no ethical justification for making unilateral decisions about what happened to Ms. Smith,” as he told ABC News.

The Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care Act of 2007 should not have applied to Smith, according to Thaddeus Pope, a law professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. Although the Act bars taking a woman off life support if a viable fetus is found, it wouldn’t have applied to Smith, as she was brain-dead. The decision to end life while terminating the pregnancy could have been up to Smith’s family members. Smith’s family didn’t have to legally be subject to watching their child be kept alive for another.

What does this mean for all women in the U.S. moving forward?

The baby, Chance, was delivered at 1 pound and 13 ounces, according to ABC News. His body measurements and overall condition are extremely under average for a newborn baby. He is now in the NICU, where he will have to remain for an unknown time. 

Now that the baby has been born, there are concerns about what will happen next for the future of women in America. 

If the baby can survive these next few weeks in the NICU and lead a “successful” life, will it give people an opportunity to argue that this was morally right? That turning a brain-dead woman into an incubator as her family hopelessly has to watch, is okay as long as there is some sort of life that comes out of it? Does the consideration of respecting a woman’s life and her family’s concerns no longer matter? 

The rise of more inhumane cases is possible if Smith’s baby remains alive. A future “I told you so” for conservatives who believe in no abortions or respecting a woman’s life.

The life of Adriana Smith and now her newborn baby was essentially turned into an experiment, an argument for those who support pro-abortion bans. She was forced to test how far hospitals, and more so the government, can control the lives of pregnant women who may not have any means to carry a child. As cases like these rise, the U.S. continues to push the boundary for how much women and their bodies can be controlled.