They Called It a Miracle. But We Know the Truth: The State Stole Her Dignity.
A follow-up to my previous article on Adriana Smith, whose body became the battleground for Georgia’s abortion laws.
On June 13th, at just 23 weeks gestation, a baby named Chance was delivered from the lifeless body of Adriana Smith, a 31-year-old nurse, mother, daughter, and friend who had been declared brain dead four months earlier. The child, weighing under two pounds, now fights for survival in a Georgia NICU. The state that claimed to defend life has finally allowed Adriana to die.
She is scheduled to be taken off life support this week, not because her family’s grief was finally honored, nor because medical ethics prevailed, but because the State got what it wanted. Her body served its court-imposed sentence. A heartbeat for a heartbeat. A birth extracted from a corpse.
Let’s be clear: this was never about life. It was about dominion.
Adriana never consented to this. Her family begged for dignity. Her doctors knew she was gone. But Georgia’s abortion ban, laced with language declaring embryos legal “persons” from the moment of detection, rendered her wishes irrelevant. The state froze her death in place, subordinated her humanity to fetal development, and commandeered her body for months, as if she were property.
This was not medicine. It was ideological bondage. And it was entirely preventable.
Even Georgia’s own attorney general admitted that removing life support would not have violated state law. But the damage was done. Hospitals and doctors feared legal ambiguity, moral crusaders, and political retaliation. And so Adriana remained tethered to machines—her chest rising and falling like a lie, until the fetus grew strong enough to be cut free.
They’re calling it a miracle. But no miracle begins with a woman’s death and ends with the state dragging her family through months of forced grief. No miracle requires a government to play god while pretending it’s playing savior.
Now a baby fights for survival, and the mother who bore him will finally be laid to rest.
What will they tell Chance one day? That his mother died, and then the state imprisoned her body until he was ready to be born? That her final gift was involuntary, her sacrifice stolen, her dignity denied?
This is the America Dobbs v. Jackson built. Where your rights vanish the moment a heartbeat is detected. Where death itself is not enough to restore bodily autonomy. Where a woman can be forced to serve the state—literally—after she’s gone.
Adriana Smith was not a martyr. She was a victim of cruelty disguised as law. A casualty of theocratic policy. Her story is a warning.
We pray for Chance. But we rage for Adriana.
*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky
@tonywriteshere.bsky.social
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