When a heartbeat matters more than a life lived, we’ve stopped protecting people; we’ve started owning them.
When a person is declared brain-dead, they are legally dead.
Yet, in February, Georgia doctors kept Adriana Smith on life support. Not to save her, but to serve as an incubator. For four months, machines breathed for her, her family witnessed her lifeless body around the clock and hospital bills climbed higher all because state law prioritized fetal rights over her death.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-forced birth.
Adriana was a 31-year-old nurse. She collapsed at nine weeks pregnant and suffered fatal brain clots. She wasn’t sick, injured or rejected care. She was brain-dead, and yet Georgia’s six-week “heartbeat” ban, the LIFE Act, forced physicians to keep her body going until her fetus could survive outside a ventilator. Her mother described it as “torture” to watch her daughter’s body kept alive without her consent.
On June 13, Smith underwent a c-section; the minute the baby was delivered, she was removed from life support. This was not healthcare. It was bodily control. The law ruled that the fetus had more rights than the person she already was: a corpse.
In Georgia, fetal personhood trumps autonomy even in death.
This is deeply chilling. It’s The Handmaid’s Tale made legal. The Washington Post compared it to dystopian fiction, noting how Georgia’s law “dehumanize[s] women… prioritizing the fetus over the woman.” But this isn’t fiction—it’s legislative cruelty with real victims.
And let’s be clear: this is a racial justice crisis too. Georgia’s Black women face maternal mortality at more than three times the rate of white women. Now, even death can’t free them. Adriana’s family wasn’t just robbed of choices; they were forced into a grotesque display of bodily violation.
As Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley put it: “These laws stripped Adriana of her dignity and denied her family the right to make deeply personal medical decisions.”
This ordeal raises urgent questions. Who truly holds power over our bodies, living, dying, or dead? If states can force life support on a corpse, what’s next? A terminal patient wakes before midnight to find they’re still hooked to machines because a fetus is inside them?
Our bodies have become battlegrounds for ideology, even in death.
The solution is clear: repeal these fetal personhood laws now. They are not about protecting life. They’re about exerting control. They don’t trust women (or the dead) to decide. As Pressley, Williams and Jacobs introduced in Congress: we must end fetal personhood and restore bodily autonomy, full stop.
Georgia’s abortion ban didn’t just fail Adriana Smith. It turned her into a legal human incubator. It’s time for everyone to sit back, look in the mirror and ask: when did we decide that a womb mattered more than a soul?
