JUSTICE FOR ADRIANA SMITH: THE WAR ON BLACK WOMEN'S BODIES

Adriana Smith was a 30-year-old Black nurse, mother, and daughter who was full of life and early pregnancy. She collapsed in February of this year. A headache. Then dizziness. Then gone. Brain dead. Yet somehow, months later, her body remains artificially sustained, bound to machines, bound to a fetus, and bound by a Georgia law that dares to defy humanity itself.

Her family, especially her mother, has begged for closure. They have pleaded to lay Adriana to rest. But Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, passed in the wake of the fall of Roe v. Wade, has shackled Adriana’s remains to a pregnancy she can no longer carry. She was nine weeks pregnant when her brain ceased function. Now, nearly four months later, she is still being used—her body, her womb, her life reduced to a legal container.

This is not a tragic accident of policy. It is a deliberate continuation of how this country has treated Black women’s bodies from the beginning: as vessels, as tools, as property. The denial of bodily autonomy did not begin in 2025. It began on the auction blocks of the South, in the medical theaters of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology” who experimented on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. It continued through the forced sterilization of poor Black and Indigenous women well into the 20th century, sanctioned by courts, disguised as care. It echoes through the Tuskegee experiment, where Black men were allowed to die slowly in the name of science, and it screams through modern labor rooms where Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

Adriana’s case is not exceptional—it is American. It is the predictable outcome of a system designed to extract from Black women without regard, compassion, or consent. And it is fully legal. Georgia is one of at least 30 states with statutes that restrict the removal of life support from pregnant individuals, even if they are legally dead. These laws silence families, override advance directives, and erase the medical reality that a person is no longer living. They turn grief into hostage negotiation, compassion into courtroom calculus.

Yet the Georgia Attorney General’s office recently confirmed that the six-week law does not require life support for brain-dead individuals. That means the hospital is making a choice—a choice to uphold the spirit of forced pregnancy even when there is no spirit left in the patient. A choice rooted not in law, but in fear and control.

We have seen this playbook before. During slavery, Black women’s reproductive capacities were governed by state law and white economic interests. Their children became property. Their bodies were breeding grounds. Today, Adriana’s body is being used by a state that calls it justice. But it is not justice—it is cruelty masquerading as law.

Adriana Smith’s rights have been violated in every way that matters. Her right to die with dignity. Her family’s right to mourn and decide her care. Her unborn child’s right not to be born into trauma and systemic injustice. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law, but where is that protection when laws are enforced only to coerce, never to care?

We must not allow this to be another moment of silent mourning. Adriana’s story must ignite us. We must demand legislative repeal of pregnancy-based life support statutes that erase brain death. We must push for federal reproductive justice protections that go beyond choice and include care, consent, and dignity in death. We recognize that history does not just live in textbooks but it lives in policy, in hospitals, in courts, and in many other instances like the decisions being made in Adriana’s name.

This is our call to action. We must show up for Adriana and every Black woman whose body was written out of the law, whose suffering was ignored until the system needed her womb. We cannot let her become another name on a tragic list. She is not a headline. She is our sister. And her body, even in death, deserves more than this.

Let this post be a living document of rage, of resolve, and of resurrection. We fight not just for Adriana—but for all those who came before her and those who will come after her unless we change the law, rewrite the rules, and reclaim our right to be seen, heard, and free.