The baby of a brain-dead woman is “expected to be OK” after he was prematurely born via C-section. His miraculous birth against all odds, however, was overshadowed by activists and corporate media who used the circumstances of his gestation and entry into the world to bash Georgia’s pro-life protections.
Adriana Smith was roughly eight weeks pregnant when she suffered complications from multiple blood clots in her brain that left her unresponsive and ultimately put her on life support. The day before she was rushed to a hospital by ambulance and declared officially “brain-dead,” the 30-year-old was reportedly sent home with medication but no further testing, according to her family, despite suffering “intense” headaches.
Despite the trauma his mother’s body endured, Smith’s son spent the last four months growing in the womb under the direction and facilitation of doctors at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta, which attributed its decision to keep Smith on life support to “Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”
The hospital reportedly hoped that the unborn baby would make it to 32 weeks gestation before he was delivered, but ended up announcing his arrival closer to the 25th week of pregnancy. Smith’s family named the 1lb 13 oz boy Chance, an appropriate title for a baby who was given a chance at life outside of the womb despite the less-than-ideal circumstances that defined his gestation.
Instead of celebrating the medical miracle of Chance’s birth and ongoing survival in the neonatal intensive care unit at just less than two pounds, however, corporate media and Democrats are still shrieking about Smith and her family’s lack of “choice” in the decision to give her baby more time to grow in the womb.
Articles and Instagram posts alike claimed Smith was “forced” to carry her child, “didn’t get a say in the matter,” and was reduced to an “incubator” due to the Peach State’s heartbeat law. Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s post about Smith’s situation indicated the decision to keep her baby gestating was “medical abuse” and “torture.”
Even Smith’s family eventually bought into the narrative that they “had no say so regarding her lifeless body and unborn child.”
“Adriana was only 2 months when placed on support and [we] were given no choice to wait for months to find out the baby will suffer disease which will lead to major disabilities,” the GoFundMe organized by Smith’s mom states.
Never mind that the office of Georgia’s attorney general confirmed the LIFE Act doesn’t mandate keeping someone on life support and clarified that “removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.”
Nevermind that the law that most likely informed doctors’ decisons to mechanically keep Smith’s vitals functioning wasn’t even the LIFE Act, but the Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care Act of 2007, which prevents life-ending action against a pregnant woman based on the viability of her baby and the presence of an advance directive, which Smith did not have.
And never mind that initial interviews with Smith’s mother indicated “I just want to be clear on something: We want her to have her baby.”
“We want her life to continue throughout her children,” April Newkirk declared.
The leftists who took an interest in Smith’s story over the last few months seemed more angered by her son surviving than by the hospital allegedly choosing not to fully investigate what turned out to be the condition that killed the mother of two.
Déjà Vu
If reading about a black, female health care professional in Georgia who died after allegedly experiencing malpractice or neglect, but whose passing corporate media and Democrats exploited to attack the Peach State’s pro-life protections sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Just last year, the blue party and its allies in the activist press banded together to pretend that the death of Amber Thurman, a young black, female medical assistant in Georgia, was due to a law banning abortion and not the septic shock she developed due to an abortion drug to end her twin pregnancy. Everyone on the left from the Democrats’ presidential ticket to presidential ticket to the propagandists at The Atlantic insisted that Thurman’s blood was on pro-life legislators’ hands.
Thurman’s babies had already passed from starvation and partial expulsion by the time she arrived at the hospital for excessive blood loss, vomiting, and fainting. Even if they hadn’t, the Georgia law vilified by the left specifically carves out exceptions for procedures like dilation and curettage if it “is necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”
Instead of immediately providing Thurman the care she needed for the dangerous complications she was suffering at the hands of mifepristone, however, Peach State doctors did not perform the surgery she needed until it was too late.
A maternal mortality review committee stated that earlier intervention “could have” saved Thurman, suggesting that the weight of the responsibility rests with the doctors who delayed the surgery. Even ProPublica, which debuted its story about Thurman just in time for the 2024 election, admitted in its 57th paragraph that “it is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C.”
In Smith’s case, it is unclear why she was reportedly sent home from the hospital without testing. The lack of outrage at the alleged neglect she suffered, however, is practically nonexistent. Instead, activists, their allies in the corporate media, and even her family chose to aim their fire, which was public and permanently preserved on the internet, at Chance’s birth and the lack of “choice” involved.
This behavior shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, the media and their partners in the Democrat Party routinely ignore the dangerous and deadly side effects of the abortion pill because it undermines their back-alley abortions-for-all agenda.
If the reaction to Chance’s birth and Smith’s death proves anything, it’s that the left only pretends to care about victims as long as they can exploit those victims’ stories to advance its agenda.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
