Is Adriana Smith Dead Enough for Georgia?

From Sims to Sanger to State-Sanctioned Incubation: The Ongoing Colonization of the Black Female Body

A Corpse in Custody: The State’s War on Dignity

“Georgia law does not allow her to die.”

That is the appalling phrase doctors at Emory University Hospital are telling the mother of Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother who was declared legally and medically brain dead in February 2025.

Yet her body remains on life support.

Why?

Because a 9-week-old fetus — the size of a raspberry — was detected in her womb at the time of her death. Under Georgia's 6-week abortion ban (O.C.G.A. §16-12-141), that fetus is granted full personhood. That fetus, not Adriana. That fetus, not her grieving family. And so, she is no longer treated as a human being but as a gestational property of the state.

This fetus is not viable. It cannot survive outside the womb. There is no medical justification for keeping Adriana on machines. This is not “pro-life” — this is pro-power, and the Georgia law is being used to prove a point, not preserve life.

Let me be direct: the state is using a dead Black woman’s body as an incubator. Her mother is not allowed to bury her. Her children are not allowed to say goodbye. Her dignity has been hijacked by a law that needs to be overturned.

📎 Sources: NPR (2025), Georgia Code §16-12-141, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981)

Legal Precedent and Constitutional Trespass

What Georgia is doing is not just immoral — it’s unconstitutional.

In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health (1990), the Supreme Court affirmed a family’s right to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. Adriana Smith is not in a coma — she is dead. The family should have the legal right to bury her, as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

In Texas, when Marlise Muñoz was declared brain dead in 2013 and pregnant, her family faced similar horror. But eventually, a judge ruled that the hospital was wrong to keep her on machines. The law recognized her death.

Adriana’s family has received no such justice. Georgia’s abortion law overrides both Cruzan and everyday medical ethics. It violates the family’s right to refuse unwanted intervention. It turns private grief into a public spectacle of control.

📎 Sources: Cruzan v. Missouri, In re Muñoz (2014), Relf v. Weinberger (1977)

From Gynecological Violence to Eugenic Legacy — and Now, Back Again

What’s happening in Georgia is not new.

Adriana Smith’s body being used posthumously — without consent, without dignity — is not some tragic oversight. It’s a policy outcome born from centuries of practice. What’s happening in Georgia is simply the 21st-century echo of a systemic war against Black women’s bodies — from forced labor to forced births to forced silence.

Let’s trace that bloodline:

• J. Marion Sims, lauded in medical textbooks as the “father of modern gynecology,” built his legacy on the torn, unanesthetized bodies of enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. These women did not give consent. They had no agency. They were treated as medical equipment and left without recognition or restitution.

• Fast forward to the 20th century, and we find Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights icon, who went into a Mississippi hospital for a uterine tumor and came out forcibly sterilized — a practice so common it had a name: the Mississippi Appendectomy. Hamer would later testify before Congress, declaring that “they sterilized me just like I was some kind of animal.”

• In 1973, just as Roe v. Wade was being decided, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, two young Black girls aged 12 and 14, were surgically sterilized in Alabama without their mothers’ informed consent. Their case, Relf v. Weinberger, revealed that over 100,000 poor women, many Black, had been sterilized using federal funds. In many cases, women were lied to, coerced, or operated on under pretenses.

• And now in Georgia, a dead Black woman is being used to sustain a fetus, not because her family requested it, but because the state has seized her body. They call it “protecting life.” But they’ve stripped her of the fundamental human right to die in peace.

Let me be blunt: when the state overrides a woman’s death to benefit a potential life, it is declaring that her existence was merely instrumental. Adriana Smith is not a person in their eyes — she is policy real estate.

There is no way to separate this from race, class, or history. Georgia’s law does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in the legacy of medical apartheid. Of plantation medicine. Of coerced sterilization. Of scientific racism.

And most hauntingly, it exists in a legal system that still cannot fully see Black women as owners of their bodies.

This is not just about abortion. It’s about who is allowed to be fully human. When a dead woman’s womb has more legal protection than her memory, her voice, or her mother’s right to bury her, we are not in the realm of medicine. We are in the realm of state-backed reproductive coercion.

And history tells us: when women — especially Black women — are erased from the decision-making table, they are always returned to one role:

The vessel.

📎 Sources: Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington, Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts, Segregation’s Science by Gregory Dorr

Neuropsychology: The Violence of Prolonged Denial

What’s happening to Adriana Smith’s family is not simply an emotional tragedy. It is a neuropsychological assault — a trauma that rewires the brain, paralyzes mourning, and traps survivors in a suspended state of pain.

When a loved one dies, the brain, especially the limbic system, which governs emotional regulation, begins the grief process through a neurochemical and cognitive unraveling of the attachment. Hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine spike, followed by slow recalibration as the prefrontal cortex accepts loss. But this process hinges on one essential truth: acknowledgment of death.

April Newkirk, Adriana Smith’s Mother

Adriana Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, has been denied that truth.

Instead of planning her daughter's funeral, she is forced to watch a machine-operated mimicry of life. There are no goodbye rituals, no eulogy, no final touch. Instead, there is a daily confrontation with a warm body, breathing by pump, yet unmistakably gone. This mismatch between what the senses perceive and what the mind knows is the psychological definition of ambiguous loss, which is uniquely corrosive.

According to Dr. Pauline Boss, who coined the term, ambiguous loss “freezes the grief process” and results in “unresolved trauma, identity confusion, and chronic anxiety.” Neuroimaging studies confirm that this limbo state activates the anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala, regions linked to prolonged distress and depressive rumination. In essence, the family becomes neurologically stuck, unable to heal.

And for Black families, this is not just individual trauma — it's intergenerational reactivation.

Neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Yehuda’s work on epigenetics has shown that traumatic stressors — like forced separation, state violence, or coerced bodily exploitation — can imprint themselves onto DNA, altering stress regulation for future generations. The denial of burial rights is not a neutral bureaucratic delay. It’s a reenactment of plantation-era practices where Black bodies were used, unburied, dissected, and discarded without ceremony.

Georgia’s law does not just criminalize bodily autonomy. It criminalizes grief itself.

And grief, healthy grief, is vital for survival. It is how the brain makes sense of finality, reintegrates memory, and allows the living to move forward. What this law does is neurologically stall that process. It weaponizes a corpse to perform the illusion of motherhood, all while eviscerating the mental and emotional health of the living.

This is not life support. It is a form of deprivation, sanctioned by the state and enforced through machinery.

📎 Sources: Boss (2000), Yehuda et al. (2016), The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy by Louis Cozolino

What We Must Demand — and How We Must Demand It

This is not just about asking. It is about strategic, multi-tiered demands—legal, medical, and cultural—because the system has already shown us it won’t course-correct without pressure.

We demand:

1. An Immediate Judicial Intervention in Georgia

The Georgia Supreme Court must issue a writ of mandamus or injunctive relief to stop the use of life-sustaining technology on legally deceased individuals, especially when the fetus is nonviable and the family opposes continuation.

• This demand is grounded in the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause, which protects a family’s right to control posthumous decisions.

• Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health (1990) affirmed that families may withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment.

• The Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981), adopted by most U.S. states, including Georgia, clearly states that brain death is legal death.

• Georgia’s refusal to act in accordance with this standard is not only cruel — it’s unconstitutional.

📎 Legal Sources:

• Cruzan v. Missouri, 497 U.S. 261 (1990)

• Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981)

• O.C.G.A. § 31-10-16 (Georgia's adoption of the UDDA)

2. Federal Constitutional Challenge to Fetal Personhood Statutes

Fetal personhood laws, such as those in Georgia, must be brought before the federal courts as violations of bodily autonomy and family integrity under the Constitution.

• These laws are written without medical nuance and violate the principles established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which, though overturned in Dobbs, emphasized that laws cannot create undue burdens that distort medical care.

• These statutes deny families a say in postmortem decisions and effectively criminalize grief when death and dignity conflict with the state’s ideological agenda.

• They should be challenged under substantive due process as outlined in Moore v. East Cleveland (1977), which protects family decision-making against governmental intrusion.

📎 Legal Sources:

• Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)

• Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 (1977)

• Relf v. Weinberger, 565 F.2d 722 (D.C. Cir. 1977)

3. Federal Legislation on the Right to Burial and Neuropsychological Integrity

We need a new federal bill, akin to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Pregnancy Discrimination Act, that centers posthumous consent and family grief rights as healthcare rights.

• This law must recognize complicated grief, ambiguous loss, and trauma as diagnosable, documented conditions.

• It must restrict states from denying burial or medical closure based on gestational status, especially when the fetus is previable.

• This is not a religious debate — it is a public health mandate. As Boss (2000), Yehuda (2016), and Cozolino (2017) show, unresolved grief causes cognitive impairment, chronic illness, and multigenerational harm.

📎 Psychological Sources:

• Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss (2000)

• Rachel Yehuda, “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects” (Biological Psychiatry, 2016)

• Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy (2017)

4. National Public Hearings and Civil Rights Investigations

We demand that Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hold public hearings to investigate:

• How abortion bans impact Black maternal mortality and neuropsychological outcomes.

• Whether hospitals like Emory are violating civil rights statutes (e.g., Title VI of the Civil Rights Act) by failing to provide culturally competent care and trauma-informed options to Black families.

• Whether the state is engaging in coercive reproductive policy that echoes historical abuses, including those exposed in Buck v. Bell (1927) and the sterilization scandals of the 20th century.

We must treat this as a human rights issue, not a state-by-state skirmish. We must show up to city council meetings, court steps, medical board hearings, and digital platforms with the same fire they used to hijack our bodies.

📎 Historical and Legal Sources:

• Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)

• Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964

• Reports by the Guttmacher Institute and the Center for Reproductive Rights (2022–2024)

How We Must Demand It:

We don't ask politely for our rights. We document. We organize. We mobilize.

• Use FOIA requests to demand records from Emory and Georgia DPH.

• File complaints with the HHS Office for Civil Rights.

• Partner with Black maternal health collectives, doulas, and legal defense funds like the Abortion Defense Network.

• Educate others through platforms like Substack, TikTok, and Instagram, until this story spreads louder than their silence.

Adriana Smith is not a footnote. She is the moment. And what happens next will determine whether any of us, especially Black women, are allowed to rest in peace.