Adriana Smith: Heartbeat

By Audrey Hwang

There's no politician in your bedroom explaining why you're bleeding out in bed every day.

There's no representative in your house helping you adjust to a new life, one where you have limited bodily functions.

There's no senator explaining to you why they’re voting on bills that prevent your access to the healthcare that you desperately need.

If they aren't there to see the effects of their policies, they shouldn’t be allowed to determine them in the first place.

It's easy to argue that you are pro-life when you don't have to face the families affected by you. What’s so pro-life about losing a woman? What’s so pro-life about letting women fight day to day just because you prevent doctors from providing healthcare?

If you were such an advocate for pro-life, you wouldn’t be infringing on rights.

And in the case of Adriana Smith, it's not pro-life when you show no respect to a deceased body or sympathy for a grieving family.

In February of this year, Smith reported intense headaches that were treated with mediation from the local hospital. However the next morning, she was gasping for air and it was ultimately the blood clots in her brain that led to Emory University declaring her brain dead.

Now at the time, Adriana was 21 weeks into her pregnancy, and removing any of the medical tubes or devices connected to her body would likely mean the fetus wouldn’t be able to survive in the host.

The hospital is currently telling her family that they are not legally allowed to remove the devices that have kept their brain-dead daughter alive for 3 months because her fetus has a detectable heartbeat.

States have taken it so far that ‘heartbeat laws’ now exist. A fetus in Georgia now gains legal recognition once a heartbeat is detected. A heartbeat can be detected anywhere from 5 ½ to 6 weeks after conception.

Georgia has enacted some of the strict abortion laws in the nation. Barely any women know about their pregnancy near the 6 week mark, tying you down in a pregancy that should rely on your decision and choice.

Rather than letting the family decide what is best for their daughter, these laws have restricted and redefined care. It isn't the decision of the family, it's what the law will allow you to do.

Her body isn't an incubator.

Her life shouldn't have to be remembered as a body used to keep a fetus viable till birth.

Life deserves to be brought into the world. But placing a new life about a current life isn't a justification for ‘pro-life’ argumentation.

When a heartbeat gets protected over the body it is in, it's a clear sign that politics shouldn't even be in the same equation as human rights. It shouldn’t be laws that define women's choices, but rather their own circumstances.