On Friday 13 June, a baby was born in an Atlanta hospital to a woman who had been dead for four months. Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother, was declared brain dead in February after blood clots formed in her brain. Legally, and by all meaningful measures, she was dead then: the woman who loved her family, laughed with her friends, comforted her son, helped her colleagues and cared for her patients was gone then, and was never coming back. But the state of Georgia, and the administrators of the hospital where she was declared dead, kept her corpse in a state of artificial animation for months. That’s because when Smith went to the hospital in February complaining of a headache, and later became unresponsive, she was about eight weeks pregnant. According to her family, doctors at Emory hospital, in Georgia, told the family that the state’s abortion ban required them to maintain the regimen that falsely animated their daughter’s corpse so that the fetus inside her could continue to grow.
The Georgia state attorney general denies that the state’s abortion ban required this abuse of Smiths’s body. But other supporters of the law disagree. The result, either way, was the same: in deference to a law that created genuine ambiguity about what freedoms Smith’s doctors and family had in the wake of her death, a woman who did nothing other than be pregnant was denied the right to rest in peace.
Brain death is distinct from a vegetative state or a coma; it is the complete and permanent loss of the function of the entire brain, including the loss of the function of the brain stem, which is needed for basic organ functions like the reflexive intake of breath and the beating of the heart. There is no chance of recovery; usually, the invasive life support required to sustain the body of a brain dead patient is administered only long enough for the patient’s family to say goodbye. That’s because what life support does to a patient’s body, in addition to being medically futile, is also extreme and invasive. The artificial ventilator that acts as a bellows, pushing air in and out of the dead lungs, involves tubes inserted through the nose and throat, extending into the stomach and windpipe.
These tubes, in Smith’s case, were tools of the state, extending the force of the law into the inside of her corpse. It was the state, via these machines, that pumped her heart, contracted her lungs, and pushed blood into the dead tissues of her body, so that cells could continue dividing inside her uterus. It was the state that used these machines to desecrate Smith’s corpse – to turn it from the vessel for a beautiful person, the nurse and mother, into an object that symbolized women’s degradation and Smith’s disposability. What should have been a respected artifact of a loved person became a macabre marionette, pushed and pulled by a state apparatus that sees all women’s bodies as mere means to its own ends.
Last month, the fetus was cut out of her corpse prematurely; presumably, doctors did not think that the dead body could sustain a pregnancy any longer. Physicians working on Smith’s case told her family that as a result of gestating inside a dead uterus, the resulting child could experience health complications ranging from blindness to the inability to walk. The infant that was extracted from the dead woman, a baby boy, weighs less than 2lbs, and is currently in neonatal intensive care. The family has named him Chance.
The desecration of Smith’s corpse by Emory University hospital and the state of Georgia is a grim reminder of how little women’s personhood is esteemed in post-Dobbs America. But Adriana is not the first woman to have her dead body abused this way. In 2013, a 33-year-old Texas woman, Marlise Muñoz, was declared brain dead after suffering a pulmonary embolism. Because she was 14 weeks pregnant, the hospital argued that the state of Texas required her to be kept on life support, solely so that her corpse could be used to continue the cultivation of the fetus. Her husband, Erick, sued to have her removed from life support so that he could bury his wife and grieve in peace; still, the hospital artificially animated her corpse until a judge ordered them to stop. Marlise’s family would tell reporters that as they visited her body in the hospital, they could smell her flesh decaying.
There is something particularly unsettling about seeing a corpse: the absence of the person who was once there is so conspicuous that it makes the body uncanny. That the body is not the person becomes clear the moment you see a body without a human person in it. And yet the body is the instrument and vessel of the person who animates it, and as such it commands to be treated with dignity, with a kind of reverence, with the respect you would give to a human being. Abortion bans disregard this: they appropriate the body for the ends of the state, indifferent to the will or the dignity of the person who lives in it. Rape functions this way, too – using a body for an end, without deferring to the person who inhabits it. In both cases – rape and abortion bans – the body of a living person is reduced to an instrument for someone else’s use. That contrast – between the dignity that a human being’s body demands and the instrumentalization with which it is treated – is what supplies abortion bans and sexual violence with their moral horror. They treat living people as mere objects. In that sense, a corpse might be the perfect vehicle for the anti-abortion movement’s agenda: it is a female instrument without the annoying encumbrance of a female person.
But Adriana Smith was a person; so was Marlise Muñoz. They were not objects, or instruments; they were people endowed with dignity and rights. In life and in death, they deserved better. Every woman does.