Almost three years after Roe v. Wade can still shock the consequences of abortion rights. In February, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse and mother in Georgia, was nine weeks pregnant when she was brought to Emory University Hospital with severe headaches. A CT scan showed blood clots in her brain, and soon the doctors Smith declared a brain.
Since then, doctors have kept Smith on a ventilator. Her mother says doctors told the family that their hands were associated with Georgia's abortion laws that criminalize the procedure after six weeks and defines a “natural person” for “human being, including an unborn child”. Smith's case shows that the consequences of the final game of the anti-abdominal movement-the fetal personality, the claim that human life and constitutional rights begin at the moment an egg is fertilized-beyond the typical abortion case. And their emergency is also a memory of the abortion rights movement: Even the right to abortion has not always protected women like Smith or their families.
Anti-abbreviation groups see cases like Smith as an opportunity to create precedent.
It is easy to present Smith's case in a world in which Roe was still the law as unimaginable. But before the prevailing Dobbs Rogen overturned, hospitals sometimes made similar movements when the right was to choose an abortion. The argument was simple: In the days of Roe, when the state's concern for the life of fetal life was directed against the autonomy of a woman, the latter sat down. But when a woman was brain dead, some hospitals thought that the conflict disappeared in a magical way. A special idea of the fetal personality deleted the personality of everyone else who was involved in cases like Adriana Smith's.
In 1987 a woman named Angela Carder was 26 weeks pregnant when doctors found a large tumor in her lungs. Her condition deteriorated so quickly that doctors could not ask her what she wanted to do about her pregnancy. A judge ordered a caesarean section against the wishes of Carder's family, which was convinced that she had not chosen the procedure.
Both the carder and the child died and their family successfully sued, but the law on this topic remained cloudy. In Georgia, for example, the state's Supreme Court decided in 1981 that a hospital could force a woman to undergo a caesarean section to save the life of an unborn child. In 1986 a 19-year-old woman from Washington, DC called Ayesha Madyun, refused for religious reasons, but the hospital received a judicial order that enabled the operation.
In recent times, a 33-year-old woman named Marlise Munoz was spoken out as a brain dead in 2013 after collapsing on her kitchen floor. Munoz, who was 14 weeks pregnant, lived in Texas, one of almost a dozen countries in which laws in the books were forced to force hospitals to keep pregnant patients in terms of life support, even in cases of brain death. Finally, Munoz's husband was able to receive a court decision test that the hospital asked to end life preservation.
In any case, the judges assumed that the state had a convincing interest in protecting life in the womb, or that an embryo or a fetus was a patient with rights and interests that could overcome those of a pregnant woman, even if she theoretically had a right to abortion. These cases still take place in states in which abortion protect: on Staten Island, in New York, a woman named Rinat Dray was forced to have a caesarean section against her will. Your misconducts suit has not yet been completed.
The threat of law enforcement is no longer abstract.
All cases send all the same message: Courts have assigned so much value to the fetal life that these interventions were common, even in times when the law theoretically protects reproduction rights. Imagine what this means that Roe is gone.
The end game for the anti-abbreviation movement has long been the legal recognition of the fetal personality. When Roe was in the books, this was something of a pipe dream, because Roe's Supreme Court had decided that the 14th change before birth had not created any rights. That is no longer true. In theory, state legislators, state courts and even federal judges can recognize enforceable fetal rights. All of these steps are intended to lead to a decision by the Supreme Court, which recognizes the fetal rights that would make liberal laws on abortion or even in -vitro fertilization.
Not every case like Smiths or Munoz probably landed in front of the dishes or in the news. Some hospitals could be able to shift the wishes of the family because they were active in a legal gray area, or they assumed that the prosecutors may not be reluctant to accumulate if there was a federal law on abortion, especially if a healthy birth seemed unlikely.
Now anti-abbreviation groups see cases such as Smith as an opportunity to create precedent. Just like the state legislators, such as those in Georgia, who praised Emory Healthcare. And the threat of law enforcement is no longer abstract. All of this means that Smith is the first person who experiences this kind of fate to Dobbs, but it will not be the last.
But Smith's case is also a further memory of supporters for reproductive rights that are not yet sufficient. Even if there was a right to vote, the judges did not seem certain, which meant that a woman refused or, as a hospital, wanted to keep a woman about the life support against the wishes of her family and regardless of the opportunities of a healthy birth. Whatever reproductive law comes next does not mean much, unless it helps the next Adriana Smith.
