The body of a legally dead woman is being forced to carry her baby to term, and Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse wants everyone to know “the body of Adriana Smith is being put through hell.”
Adriana Smith was a 30-year-old Atlanta nurse who died after an unsuccessful surgery to remove blood clots in her brain. She had one young child, but Hesse believes “what happened next turned the situation from a tragedy into an absolute horror show.”
According to local reports, her family was told she was not allowed to actually die because she was nine weeks pregnant at the time.
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The hospital believes removing Smith’s life support would violate Georgia’s antiabortion laws.
“Georgia’s law does have an exception to save the life of the mother,” Hesse said, “but it apparently doesn’t apply to Smith’s scenario because her life cannot be saved. It is already over.”
“This is torture for me,” Smith's mom, April Newkirk told the local television station. “I see my daughter breathing by the ventilator but she’s not there.”
The baby is now 21 weeks along and has fluid in his brain.
Republican state Senator Ed Setzler told the Associated Press, “The hospital is acting appropriately.” He later added, “I think there’s a valuable human life that we have an opportunity to save, and I think it’s the right thing to save it.”
Setzler sponsored Georgia’s 2019 abortion law.
“This is hideous,” Hesse said. “This is hideous. The person who is not currently being treated as human is Adriana Smith.”
She went on to say, “This family is living out a nightmare in which they must watch her belly swell, as their own emotions rise and the hell they are in becomes more fraught and complicated with each passing hour.”
“Sweet Lord, it turns out I can still be shocked. It turns out I can still be stunned and infuriated by the audacity with which some lawmakers will decide that the lives of women do not matter,” Hesse added. “By the absolutely perverse definitions of life and dignity and religion that they use to justify this grotesquerie.”
She ended her column saying, “Gilead. Gilead. Gilead," in reference to the popular Handmaid's Tale.
