The son of a brain-dead pregnant woman in Georgia has been delivered and his mother removed from life support, the family has said.
The case of Adriana Smith, who suffered blood clots in her brain in February when she was around 8 weeks pregnant, had reignited debate over the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its effect on women’s health care.
Smith turned 31 on Sunday. Her baby, named Chance, was delivered early Friday morning by emergency C-section, weighing 1 pound, 13 ounces. Doctors originally said they hoped to sustain the pregnancy until August, when the baby had the best chance of survival.
“He’s expected to be OK,” Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, told WXIA-TV, an NBC affiliate in Atlanta. “He’s just fighting. We just want prayers for him. Just keep praying for him. He’s here now.”
The station reported that Smith had been taken off life support on Tuesday at Emory University Midtown Hospital in Atlanta.
The case had made headlines across the country, in part because people wrongly assumed that Georgia’s strict abortion law required the family to keep Smith on life support. The law protects a fetus from the time a heartbeat is detected, usually around 6 weeks of gestation, but the Georgia Attorney General’s Office said that the law does not apply in this case.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, previously told the Deseret News that although removing a pregnant woman from life support does not legally constitute an abortion, “a lot of doctors are very risk averse” in states with strict abortion laws.
“If there’s any kind of ambiguity, even if it’s not significant ambiguity, doctors are really reluctant to face the kinds of negative outcomes that are possible,” Ziegler said last month.
Smith’s mother made headlines by saying that the family should have made the decision whether to keep her on life support, but she also said that she hoped the child would survive. Smith has another son, who is 7.
The baby remains in the neonatal intensive care unit, WXIA reported.
Even after the birth, some people on social media were objecting to Smith being kept alive, saying she was “robbed of dignity” in death and forced to be an incubator.
But Wesley J. Smith, writing for National Review, said, “If Adriana’s body had been removed from mechanical support, there would have been two deaths. Because it wasn’t, now there is only one. Isn’t that a cause for celebration, even as we mourn the mother who was lost?”
While babies that are extremely premature face significant challenges, Smith’s baby is not the smallest ever born, and babies weighing less than 1 pound have survived.
