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A Black pregnant woman who was declared brain dead back in February is still being kept alive on a ventilator, because of a Georgia law that prohibits abortions beyond six weeks. If this sounds like the stuff of speculative fiction, it’s because there’s literally a Handmaid’s Tale episode about this. And while the TV show based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book may have gotten many things right about the soul of authoritarianism and a violently patriarchal society, living that reality is even more sickening.
Anyone who thinks this is about the life of Adriana Smith’s child is fooling themselves. This is the state, boundary testing to see how far they can take their efforts to have full reproductive control over American women, and gauging how much the American public is willing to tolerate.
It is unclear whether Smith’s baby will survive, and according to the family, Emory University Hospital is keeping her on life support because the hospital is afraid of contravening Georgia law. Meanwhile, state lawmakers and abortion rights opponents have put their hands up and don’t want to be associated with the optics of this tragic mess. In a mid-May press release, the Georgia attorney general’s office clarified that the state’s anti-abortion law does not require Smith be kept alive.
“There is nothing in the Life Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death,” the statement reads. “Removing life support is not an action ‘with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy’.”
So who is responsible for this? And are we to believe that Georgia lawmakers are powerless to stop this hospital’s apparent misreading of the state’s own rules? Even if the latter were the case, the damage from conservatives’ anti-abortion crusades and the ensuing legislative crackdown has already been done. Hospitals such as Emory have no incentive to weigh the ethical implications of their actions because they have the spirit of the law to consider, regardless of how lawmakers try to play semantic tricks to get around their own culpability.
When it comes to public opinion, some have argued in favor of this nightmare based on the fact that Smith is brain dead, and so keeping her alive doesn’t actually “harm” her. What’s next? Women in comas being impregnated because … why not? Vulnerable women being lobotomized and used as incubators? Should the state be able to forcefully impregnate every woman whose body is capable of carrying a baby? Where does it stop?
Meanwhile, all the conservative posturing over the sanctity of human life is easily dismantled when you consider the fact that banning abortions effectively issues a death sentence to any pregnant person who is at risk. And what about the issues that took Smith to the hospital to begin with? Her family says she went to see doctors at around eight weeks pregnant with intense headaches, and received medication the same day. The next day, she woke up gasping for air, and was rushed back to the hospital where doctors discovered blood clots in her brain. Smith was declared brain dead shortly after.
Black women are the most likely to die during childbirth, are most likely to experience pregnancy-related complications and regularly see their issues dismissed and minimized when they seek help. Was Smith’s life not valuable when she was here? Why is the body of a brain dead woman receiving more care than she did when she was alive?
Stories like Smith’s are also a grim reminder of how desperate society is right now to reduce women to their reproductive capacity. From draconian laws that force women to endure life threatening pregnancies, to the trad-wife and pronatalism renaissance, it’s clear that women’s ability or willingness to carry babies is the political and ethical lightning rod of our time, and the “life” of a foetus has become a convenient tool to wield in the efforts to control women’s bodies.
But Black women have always known this. And Smith’s story is deeply triggering for a demographic who has not only seen the worst of what childbearing in the US medical system is like, but also has a history of being used as test dummies for gynaecological experimentation.
“We didn’t have a choice or a say about it,” Smith’s mother, April 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.”
It should go without saying that a person’s agency should be respected whether they’re conscious or not, but we’ve gotten so used to seeing women’s bodies as a means to a political or economic end that ideas like this no longer register as what they are – utterly unconscionable.
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Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
