Requiem for Adriana Smith

A transfer of agony to a new body

Adriana Smith’s corpse was cut open today, and a fetus extracted.¹ “He’s fighting …. [they say] ‘he’s gonna be ok.’”

Wow, that’s some serious bullshit this hospital is dishing out.

The fetus has been living in a corpse. It was extracted weight 1 lb and 13 oz. Given that she was 9 weeks along when declared brain dead, this fetus is probably around 23-25 weeks. At the absolute lower limit of viability.

The photo is not of Adriana Smith’s fetus, but it can give people an idea of what these extreme preemies look like, and what their lives are like. The purple object is a gloved finger. The white is tape, the plastic tube to the left is a breathing tube. It’s maybe 2.5mm or 3.0mm in diameter. At some point they’ll place a feeding tube. In this fetus, the umbilical cord is still intact, and there will be arterial and venous lines for monitoring and medication delivery.

It might or might not be able to feel pain yet.² I know I feel pain just looking at it.

The stats for survival and long term prognosis, however, are grim.³

“In the study, survival was greater for infants born later in pregnancy, with 94% of those born at 28 weeks surviving to hospital discharge and roughly 11% born at 22 weeks surviving to discharge. Survivors were assessed at 2 years corrected age — a child’s chronological age, minus the number of weeks the child was born preterm. Slightly more than 8% had moderate to severe cerebral palsy, 1.5% had vision loss in both eyes, 2.5% needed hearing aids or cochlear implants, and 15% required mobility aids such as braces, walkers, or wheelchairs. Nearly 49% had no or only mild neurodevelopmental impairment, about 29% had moderate neurodevelopmental impairment and roughly 21% had severe neurodevelopmental impairment.”

The majority have moderate to severe neurodevelopmental impairment (and that’s all comers). And this is in a research network, reporting on improved survival within their network. Community hospitals generally don’t get close to these numbers.

The odds are against this fetus surviving - strongly - and even if it does it’s quite likely to have moderate to severe neurodevelopmental impairment. We’re not talking about special ed to catch up in math here - frequently these are the children left to languish in institutions, who may be non-verbal, or spend a life tube-feed dependent.

It’s one thing if a family requests these heroics. Adriana Smith’s family was given no choice. But you can bet they’ll be given the bill for tens of millions of dollars of care. And they’ll have a dead daughter, and they have an 11% chance of the fetus surviving to hospital discharge.

Echoes of Tuskeegee

This whole freak show of an experiment smacks of the Tuskeegee syphilis study,⁴ or what Henrietta Lacks suffered at Johns Hopkins.⁵

Would this have happened to a white family? I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think so. This smacks of the lingering systemic racism that causes black patients to be undertreated for pain, and of a medical establishment that only in the past few years recognized that its “father of gynecology” was a beast who perfected his surgical techniques on unanesthetized slave women, who were afraid to cry out for fear of beatings while he insisted they couldn’t feel pain.⁶

Pro-life?

No, this is not pro-life. This is fetus fetishism. It is collective mental illness of an institution that should be permanently shuttered. While our Congress works to take away healthcare from 12-18 million Americans, and Republicans complain about the cost of Head Start and the Free Lunch program, this is how we choose to squander our resources. How many lunches could this circus sideshow have paid for? How many vaccines or well child visits or prenatal visits for wanted children whose mothers were actually still alive?

Emory Hospital Should Be Shut Down

For a hospital to engage in such a moral outrage is unconscionable. To have a bunch of cowardly risk managers insist “we’re just complying with the law” is unfathomable. Would they do the same thing for forced sterilization? In the 1950’s, a lot of hospitals did.⁷ That wasn’t about “life” any more than this charade is. It was (and is) about control and coercion.

I really hope that the things they saw and heard during this escapade haunt them nightly for the rest of their lives. They intrude on my dreams with some regularity, and I had nothing to do with this. It’s an offense to decency, to medical ethics, and to respect and regard for human life.

1. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/adriana-smith-baby-born-life-support-update-brain-dead-nicu/85-1fb6595c-3966-4a50-993d-0e36e05cb256. Accessed June 19, 2025.

2. https://www.webmd.com/baby/when-can-a-fetus-feel-pain-in-the-womb. Accessed June 19, 2025.

3. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/survival-rate-increases-extremely-preterm-infants-nih-funded-research-network#:~:text=The%20survival%20rate%20of%20extremely,the%20National%20Institutes%20of%20Health. Accessed June 19, 2025.

4. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html. Accessed June 19, 2025.

5. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z. Accessed June 19, 2025.

6. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394/-father-of-gynecology-who-experimented-on-slaves-no-longer-on-pedestal-in-nyc. Accessed June 19, 2025.

7. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/. Accessed June 19, 2025.