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It's Been a Minute

NPR

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4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Adriana Smith's pregnancy became an ethical and legal quandary. After being declared brain dead, a Georgia hospital kept her on life support without her family's consent because of the state's abortion laws. Now that the baby has been delivered and Smith taken off life support, Brittany wonders: how has the conservative effort to see fetuses as people overshadowed the lives of the mothers who birth them?

This is... Your Body, Whose Choice?

And for the next few weeks, we're looking at the cultural, legal, and ideological frameworks shaping reproductive health in America...and what this means for the near and far future of our families, our personal agency, and our planet.

Today, UC Berkley law professor Khiara Bridges joins the show to break down everything you need to know about this case and what its implications for the rights of mothers across the country.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On NPR's ThruLine,
0:03.1	Schoolteachers are going to be the ones that rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive.
0:08.9	Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, school teachers need to pick up their books.
0:13.3	How the U.S. Department of Education tried to fix a divided nation.
0:18.2	Listen to ThruLine, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25.4	Hello, hello.
0:26.9	I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR,
0:30.6	a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:47.0	Okay, Adriana Smith was about nine weeks pregnant.
0:50.7	She went to the hospital complaining of headaches. The hospital gave her some medication and sent her home.
0:55.3	Later that evening,
1:02.0	her boyfriend woke up and he saw that she was gasping for her air. Smith's boyfriend then took her to the hospital, where they found out Smith had blood clots in her brain, and shortly after,
1:06.9	the hospital determined her brain dead. However, she was already kind of hooked up to life support,
1:12.4	and the fetus demonstrated activity that it was not dead. And so the hospital kept her connected
1:19.4	to life support. I recently spoke with UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Kiara Bridges.
1:24.6	When I first heard about this case, I reached out to Kiara to find out how a situation like this could even be legally possible.
1:31.0	So the hospital has said that they have made the decision to maintain Adriana Smith on life support after consulting with medical professionals, but also with lawyers who have tried to interpret what Georgia's abortion law demands.
1:48.6	It's a lot to make sense of.
1:50.5	Georgia already had a law on the book that banned all abortions after the detection of fetal
1:57.5	heartbeat, so around six weeks of pregnancy.
2:01.6	Dorja's abortion law makes it a crime for anybody to do an act that terminates a pregnancy.
2:08.4	And so the legal question is, would removing someone from life support, would that constitute
	...

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