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The fetus of a brain dead Georgia woman who is being kept alive to carry out her pregnancy is continuing to grow, the woman’s mother said late Monday, days after the controversial case exploded into the national news and sparked questions about the ethics of using the state’s anti-abortion law to keep a woman with no chance of recovery on life support.
“He has his toes, arms, limbs – everything is forming,” the mother, April Newkirk, told the local news station 11Alive. “We’re just hoping he makes it.”
The Georgia woman, Adriana Smith, went to a hospital in February with what she thought was an intense headache, Newkirk, told 11 Alive, which first reported the story. At the time, Smith was about eight weeks into her pregnancy.
The hospital released Smith after providing her with medication, Newkirk said. The next day, Smith was rushed back to the hospital after she woke up gasping for air. The hospital diagnosed her with blood clots in her brain. Within hours of her first visit, she was declared braindead.
Under Georgia law, abortion is banned after about six weeks of pregnancy. That ban also contains provisions that strengthen the concept of “fetal personhood”, a doctrine that holds that embryos and fetuses should be considered people – and, as such, are entitled to full legal rights and protections. Newkirk said doctors told the family the law requires keeping her alive to preserve the pregnancy.
“We didn’t have a choice or a say about it,” Newkirk said. “We want the baby. That’s a part of my daughter. But the decision should have been left to us – not the state.”
Smith is currently about 22 weeks into her pregnancy. The hospital plans to keep Smith on life support until early August, when doctors will deliver the baby through a caesarean section, 11Alive reported.
“The chances of there being a healthy newborn at the end of this is very, very small,” Steven Ralston, the director of the maternal fetal medicine division at George Washington University, told the Washington Post. Newkirk said last week that the baby has fluid in the brain. “He may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she said.
The family has named the baby Chance, Newkirk said.
“Right now, the journey is for baby Chance to survive,” Newkirk said on Monday. “Whatever condition God allows him to come here in, we’re going to love him just the same.”
Smith’s case has sparked a nationwide debate about medical consent and the potentially sweeping reach of anti-abortion laws. Abortion rights activists have spent years warning about these laws’ unforeseen consequences, as instituting fetal personhood can lead to the rights of a pregnant person being pitted against that of the fetus inside them. In the years since Roe v Wade’s 2022 overturning, dozens of pregnant women have said that abortion bans led them to be denied abortions even in medical emergencies.
The hospital where Smith is currently located has not commented on her case, citing privacy laws. However, it said in a statement that it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws”.
The office of Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, has released a statement declaring that Georgia’s six-week law does not require medical professionals to keep women alive on life support after being declared brain dead. “Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy,” Carr’s spokesperson, Kara Murray, said in the statement.
Some anti-abortion advocates, however, have taken the opposite view. Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, who sponsored the state’s abortion ban, told the Associated Press that “it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child”.
He continued: “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.”
Students for Life of America, a powerful national anti-abortion group, has also backed the decision to keep Smith on life support.
“While Adriana can no longer speak for herself, her son’s life still matters. Her doctors are doing the right thing by treating him as a unique patient,” the organization said in a statement, which was accompanied by a fundraiser for Smith’s family.
Smith’s family has their own fundraiser to help cover costs associated with her care and the possibilities that her son will be born with disabilities.
