Brain-Dead Woman Gives Birth on Life Support as Newborn Fights for Survival

A woman declared brain-dead has given birth while on life support, but her newborn son is now fighting for his life in the hospital. Adriana Smith’s baby boy, named Chance, was delivered via emergency caesarean early Friday morning, weighing just one pound and 13 ounces.

Speaking to WXIA-TV after her 31-year-old daughter, who was barely six months pregnant, gave birth while brain-dead, Adriana’s grandmother April Newkirk said that Chance is “expected to be okay.” She added: “He’s just fighting. We just want prayers for him.” The heartbroken mother and now grandmother said her daughter’s harrowing medical ordeal beginning with severe headaches over four months ago.

Adriana sought help at Atlanta’s Northside Hospital in Georgia, US, but was refused treatment. However, she collapsed the following day and her boyfriend discovered her struggling to breathe.

She was then taken to Emory University Hospital, where she was found to have blood clots in her brain and was declared brain-dead while eight weeks into her pregnancy. April said the family plans to withdraw her daughter from life support this week.

According to the family, doctors at the hospital said they could not legally remove life-sustaining apparatus due to Georgia’s laws that prohibit abortion once a foetal heartbeat is detected, typically at about six weeks of gestation.

Georgia’s Republican Attorney General Chris Carr clarified in a statement that the state’s law doesn’t compel medical professionals to maintain life support for a woman declared brain-dead.

Last month, Dr Dale Gardiner, an Intensive Care Consultant and member of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, said the situation Adriana found herself in was highly unusual because life-support is not designed to be long-term treatment for brain-dead patients.

“These patients are very physiologically unstable owing to the severity of their brain injury. They are all on intensive care,” he told the Mirror.

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“Normally mechanical ventilation and other intensive care interventions are only continued for a very short time to allow family to say goodbye or to enable organ donation (for example, up to a day). It is extremely unusual to continue beyond this point.”

Her case has sparked anger around the world at the USA’s anti-abortion laws, which were swept in at state level after the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of Roe vs Wade in 2022. Under Georgia’s law – brought in by Republican politicians – abortion is banned after cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks gestation.