(Almost) as bad as it gets
This is the news I came home to, after a three day Fourth of July retreat:
“Over the weekend, 30-year-old Adriana Smith was finally laid to rest after months on life support.
Family and friends celebrated the young mother’s life at Fairfield Baptist Church in Lithonia by sharing memories of Smith’s kind spirit, while also expressing concerns about the circumstances surrounding her medical care.
It’s awful what’s happened to this family,” Tuezday Naper told Capital B Atlanta. “Women’s rights have been taken from this young woman. Our country has got to do better.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/proposed-adriana-law-override-georgia-192000125.html
For anyone who does not know, Adriana was the Black woman in Georgia, whose body was kept attached to machines in the intensive care unit for OVER FOUR MONTHS after she was declared brain dead, in order to “save her baby”.
She joined a small group of women with a horribly accurate description of their condition. She became an example of a “post mortem pregnancy”:
“Smith’s 112-day stint on organ support ranks third in length for a postmortem pregnancy, with the longest being 123 days. Hers is also the earliest ever gestational age from which the procedure has been attempted. Because time on organ support can vary widely, and because there is no established minimum fetal age considered too early to intervene, a fetus could theoretically be deemed viable at any point in pregnancy.”
Also called a “ functionally decapitated pregnancy”
If there was ever language to describe what we just witnessed here in America, “decapitated pregnancy” really says it all.
I found that term when I followed the Internet search trail down a rabbit hole for other examples of “functionally decapitated pregnancy”. Adriana was not the first (that would be 1991), nor would she be the longest body kept alive for the sake of an unborn fetus (123 days).
That dubious honor goes with a very different 2017 story; that of a married Brazilian woman whose body grew her twins for 4 months beyond her death from a stroke. A 3 pound girl and a 2.8 pound boy were delivered from her dead body by c-section- of twins at 7 months gestation.
Three months of “functionally decapitated pregnancy”.
Originally those Brazilian doctors were waiting for the twins’ heartbeat to fade to turn off the life support for the dead mother. That did not happen; those three month along fetuses stayed strong, and the hospital supported the miracle:
“A slew of health-care professionals also cared for the twins, caressing their mother’s belly and singing and talking to the growing fetuses, to ensure they felt the affection their mother could not give.
“And we decorated the area around Frankielen’s bed. The ICU was filled with love, affection and encouragement for the babies and their family to succeed. We said, ‘we love you’ every day they were here,” Erika Checan, a chaplain and music therapist, said.”
https://nypost.com/2017/07/11/brain-dead-woman-kept-alive-for-months-so-she-could-deliver-twins/
Adriana Smith’s story was very very different. Clearly there was no ICU filled with love and affection and encouragement and music.
I imagine Adriana’s functionally decapitated pregnancy as a soul killing, morally injuring experience for all caregivers involved. Way back in the 1990s, the ICU looked like a place where technicians managed slabs of meat connected to machinery; and that was long before we began to put patients into “ medically, induced comas”, so they wouldn't fight the life support equipment. Since there was no live human left growing that baby, I can't imagine staff speaking with the decapitated body or whispering sweet nothings into that expanding pregnant belly.
The swiss cheese of holes in media reporting leaves me totally disgusted with my country and clear that we have no moral integrity left; not with respect to accessing and investigating the health care of Black women, and our bodies.
WHAT I COULD FIND:
Adriana was a single Black mother to a seven year-old and was an RN:
“April Newkirk said her 30-year-old daughter, Adriana Smith, began experiencing intense headaches in early February. Smith was nine weeks pregnant at the time with her second child, NBC affiliate WXIA-TV of Atlanta reported.
Smith sought treatment at Northside Hospital But was released and given medication, Newkirk told the station. Newkirk said the hospital did not run any tests or scans.
Northside did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
A day after seeking treatment, Smith’s boyfriend woke up to find her gasping for air and making gargling noises, Newkirk told WXIA.
Smith was rushed to Emory Decatur and then transferred to Emory University Hospital, where a CT scan showed multiple blood clots in her brain, the news station reported.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-forced-keep-brain-dead-pregnant-woman-alive-rcna207002
Because Adriana died in Georgia, and Georgia passed the life act in 2022 (no abortions beyond six weeks), the family of this woman had no choice in the next series of events that turned this catastrophe into hell on earth. Adriana’s “ functionally decapitated” body was maintained on life support with the intention of growing that nine week pregnancy into a viable baby to birth by cesarean. Ideally, around 32 weeks.
That would have been close to six more months of forced gestation.
Her body only made it to 25 weeks.
1 lb. 12 oz. Baby boy Chance was delivered by cesarean section, on June 13. Friday the 13th; as if this entire story needed a final Frankenstein touch.
The hell on earth this woman's family endured drifted into the background, once it was clear that Adriana's mother would not be able to get anyone to turn off the life support equipment. But this is a quote from her mama:
“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she continued. “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."
https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-adriana-smith
WHAT I COULD NOT FIND:
– follow up on the hospital that MISDIAGNOSED this Black nurse in the first place and sent her home on meds without a CAT scan
– what happened to the baby daddy?
– what medical crisis happened that forced the 25 week (not 32 week as planned) C-section? Could it have had anything to do with the decision to move that body growing the baby from Emory to “a hospital with better obstetrical care”/ within the system?
— WHY WAS HER BODY KEPT ON LIFE SUPPORT FOR FOUR DAYS AFTER THE C-SECTION (at a cost of $5,000-$10,000 a day)?
– how much of this forced non-chosen intensive care FINANCIAL COST will be past forward to that poor grandmother?
Since this is America and our for profit healthcare system gets worse by the day, I asked DEEP SEEK AI (China based more CO2 efficient AI than ChatGPT) what that grandmama would be looking at with respect to expenses and possible outcomes as she raises Chance (if Chance survives). Here are the numbers as Deep Seek crunched them:
https://youtube.com/shorts/g-cR4VLSq4Y
In summary, Chance has a 60 to 80% chance of getting out of the newborn intensive care unit. If he survives his first year of life he has an 85 to 90% chance of living to age 6.
The preemie/ NICU related issues he still faces are:
– gut problems (NEC= “necrotizing enterocolitis”)
– brain bleeds
– potential blindness (like Stevie Wonder)
– seizures
– cerebral palsy
– hearing problems
– lung problems
ESTIMATED COST OVER THE FIRST SIX YEARS OF LIFE (FROM THIS POINT FORWARD) ARE $750,000-$3 MILLION
I cannot even imagine what has been spent in this fiasco to date.
My unanswered questions are deep and dark and paranoid.
– Were they actually trying to hit some Guinness Book record (would have been 13 more days) with this medical experiment?
– How was that Grandma expected to explain what went on over these last four months– as it was happening– to Adriana’s seven year old?
– What happened to the baby daddy?
– How did the nurses and support staff at both hospitals (her body was transferred from one location to another for “better obstetrical support” NOT due to financial concerns over ICU cost, of course) respond to this bizarre 4 months of “caretaking”?
Michelle Goodwin summed up the feminist/body autonomy issues presented by all of this, here:
“... the state of Georgia is treating Smith’s body as an ‘incubator,’ which brings up 13th Amendment questions…
‘One can’t help but think about a throughline from that period of time where Black women were forced into involuntary reproductive servitude for the benefit of other people and not for them,’ said Goodwin. ‘Certainly, Adriana will experience … no benefit from what her body has been put through and what the state hopes to accomplish.’
Goodwin also pointed out the similarities between Smith’s case and that of Marlise Muñoz, who died in 2014—but because she was pregnant, the state of Texas forcibly kept her on a ventilator for weeks while her body decomposed, against the wishes of her parents and husband.
These cases, Goodwin argued, represent ‘disparate treatment at the end of life involving a person who happens to be pregnant.’ If a man died at one of these hospitals, it’s hard to imagine that the hospital would force his body to stay on life support, she mused.”
https://msmagazine.com/2025/05/19/adriana-smith-georgia-brain-dead-abortion-ban-black-women-health/
True that, about the men. We all know the joke, “if men men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”
But there is something else deeply troubling here, related to women of color and American healthcare. Adriana Smith is dead because– despite being a nurse herself, and knowing something was wrong with her body– she received substandard care in the emergency room. She was “used as an incubator” in a most disrespectful way that is almost impossible to imagine.
Adriana's death and her functionally decapitated pregnancy ordeal starkly reflects the ongoing lack of power for Black women in America.
We are a country built on a history where “The father of gynecology” VIVISECTED Black women, yet we did not take the statue in Central Park of this monster down until April, 2018.
It is hard for me to imagine that ANY white female body would be forced into this nightmare scenario; no matter what the law was for the state.
And the new truism is “what POLICE are to Black folks? That’s what DOCTORS are to Black women.
I say to any woman of color in America, “this could have been you…”
This could have been ME.
Adriana, may you finally rest in peace.