A few blocks from where I sit writing this is Emory University Hospital Midtown, where Adriana Smith, a beautiful 30-year-old mother who was declared brain dead, is on life support. Smith is being kept on a ventilator because she is pregnant with her second child, a son.
Emory Healthcare determined that, per Georgia state law forbidding abortions once a child has a heartbeat, it must keep Smith on life support until her baby son is born.
In this terribly tragic situation, it is a miracle — and a testimony to incredible advances in medical science — that Smith’s baby will hopefully survive. Smith was declared brain dead after suffering multiple brain clots.
Yet Smith’s mother is now speaking out to complain that she doesn’t have the “choice” to decide whether her grandson will live or die.
April Newkirk, Smith’s mother, said earlier this week: “It should have been left up to the family…. I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy, but what I’m saying is, we should have had a choice.” (RELATED: America’s Abortion Blind Spot: How Liberals Convinced Americans to Ignore the Fetus)
Newkirk pointed to the possibility that her grandson will be born with disabilities, as well as the fact that the responsibility to raise him will now be hers.
“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she said. “This decision should’ve been left to us. Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have — and we’re going to be the ones raising him.”
The child’s father is in the picture as well. The baby also has an older brother, who has been visiting his mother in the hospital.
One hopes that this little boy will never hear how his grandmother publicly wished for the choice to let him die, for fear of his potential disabilities or the effort it will take to raise him. And one expects that Adriana Smith would not want her family to just take care of her older son, and leave her younger son to die, but that they would take care of and love both of them. If her family isn’t willing to do that, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of American couples who would adopt this baby boy.
Luckily, thanks to Georgia’s laws against abortion, April Newkirk will not be able to decide whether to kill her grandson. A spokesman for Emory Healthcare said in a statement that it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”
Unfortunately, the reaction to this situation in certain quarters has been rather insane. This was the most apparent in New York magazine.
Andrea González-Ramírez, “a senior writer for the Cut who covers systems of power,” wrote about Adriana Smith’s situation Thursday in an article headlined “We’re Just Human Incubators to Them.”
González-Ramírez writes that Smith’s situation proves that “To abortion opponents, a woman is nothing more than a vessel.”
“Smith’s story,” she writes, “is a monstrous new entry in the canon of post-Dobbs indignities and horrors.” González-Ramírez goes on, saying that Smith’s loved ones are experiencing a “horror” and that abortion opponents “want to strip women of their dignity, humanity, and right to bodily autonomy.” González-Ramírez expresses outrage that Smith’s family will “have to be responsible for a child who may face numerous health challenges if born.”
In contrast to the absurdity offered by González-Ramírez, a beautiful perspective on this situation is offered by a Georgia state senator, Ed Setzler.
Setzler said, “I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life.”
Indeed, in the face of the terrible tragedy of Adriana Smith’s death, we have the marvel of countless medical professionals working for months to keep her baby son alive. This is evidently a very difficult task. “It’s just hard to keep the mother out of infection, out of cardiac failure,” said Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
Adriana Smith’s baby son is as infinitely valuable as herself. It is a great goodness in the face of such tragedy that these medical professionals are working to preserve his life, as they worked to preserve hers.
But, were you to listen to González-Ramírez, this is a disgrace. “The anti-abortion movement imbues every fetus with nearly messianic potential while discarding the pregnant person carrying it as a nonentity.”
In reality, González-Ramírez is just denying the humanity of this little baby, casting him aside as useless and irrelevant. The miracle of his survival is “monstrous” to her; pregnancy is inherently disgusting to her for its compromise of “autonomy”; and human life is just something to be disposed of in the interest of supposed freedom.
The one dehumanizing a human being is González-Ramírez, who calls the unborn baby “the pregnancy.” She says, “The pregnancy is now around 21 weeks of gestation.” In other words, he is nearly to the point of being able to survive outside his mother’s womb.
Contra González-Ramírez, the pro-life movement does not view women as “vessels.” In fact, she is the one who views human beings as parasitical non-human entities and women as incubators of worthless clumps of cells.
The pro-life movement sees mothers as miraculously upholding a new human life. Not, as per González-Ramírez, “people” in a monstrous and parasitical situation with a strange entity horrifically growing inside them.
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