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@studentsforlife

Chloe Simon at MMFA:

On May 13, an Atlanta TV news station reported that a Georgia woman who had been declared brain-dead was being kept on life support because she is pregnant, and her family said the hospital attributed the action to a restrictive state abortion law. Medical experts have noted that the case shows how restrictive abortion laws are failing both patients and health care providers. However, anti-abortion groups have attempted to reframe the story around the rights of the fetus and to downplay the role of Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws, an approach they’ve also used with other stories about pregnant patients who have died after struggling to obtain needed care in states with abortion bans.  Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse and mother from Georgia, was declared brain-dead in February after suffering a medical emergency while about nine weeks pregnant. Even though that means she is legally dead, doctors at Emory University Hospital have kept her on life support in an effort to sustain the fetus to at least 32 weeks, telling her family that they are “legally required to keep Smith breathing until the fetus reaches viability,” as the Louisiana Illuminator described.  This decision seemingly has been driven by Georgia's strict abortion laws, which ban terminating a pregnancy once “fetal cardiac activity can be detected, or roughly six weeks into pregnancy.”  The office of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has said the abortion law does not require “medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death.” Some have instead claimed the governing factor in Smith’s case is Georgia’s Advance Directive for Health Care Act which restricts “doctors from withdrawing life support from a pregnant patient unless the fetus is nonviable and the patient had a written directive explicitly requesting such action." But hospital staff apparently based their action on the abortion law, citing it in explaining their decision to Smith’s mother, she said. The hospital has declined to publicly comment on the specific case, citing privacy rules. 

[...]

Anti-abortion groups are “looking away or shirking blame” when confronted with such stories

Anti-abortion groups have repeatedly undermined reports of patients who reportedly became victims of their states’ restrictive abortion laws.  After ProPublica published stories of women in Georgia and Texas who died following delayed treatment in states with strict abortion laws, anti-abortion groups attacked the reports as a “complete lie” and claimed the women did not die due to abortion bans, instead pinning their deaths on “medical malpractice” and “neglect.” In fact, two women in Texas died after failing to get proper treatment post-miscarriage under the state’s abortion ban, and a woman in Georgia died after doctors waited 20 hours to perform a dilation and curettage. This may have been due to Georgia’s recent ban on the procedure, as CBS News reported that doctors in states with restrictive abortion laws have voiced concerns over “losing their medical license or being prosecuted if they break the law.”  Substack author Jessica Valenti explained the anti-abortion groups’ strategy toward these kinds of stories as “either looking away or shirking blame.” 

[...]

Some anti-abortion groups have tried to steer blame for Smith from the abortion law to Georgia’s life-support law. 

Live Action claimed that “despite public outcry, removing a pregnant woman from life support actually DOES NOT constitute an ‘abortion’ as defined by the Georgia LIFE Act,” and argued that the onus is on the Georgia life support law which “prevents removing a pregnant woman from life support.”  Secular Pro-Life also said that it is not “not clear Georgia's abortion law is actually the issue here. It's more likely that Georgia's law regarding withdrawing life support for pregnant patients is the issue.”  Other anti-abortion groups have taken the position of arguing for the rights of the unborn fetus.  Students for Life of America complained that “activists and media voices are pressuring her family to pull the plug—ending two lives,” and Secular Pro Life said that “pro-choicers have been too quick to assume babies can’t survive in cases like this—and that Adriana Smith’s family wouldn’t want to try.” 

^ Exactly. 

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