
Tiny baby 'fighting for life' after brain dead woman on life support gives birth
Adriana Smith's son, Chance, was born via emergency caesarean and weighing one pound and 13 ounces early on Friday morning.
A woman who is on life support has given birth while being declared brain-dead - but her little baby is now in hospital"fighting for his life".
Adriana Smith's son, Chance, was born via emergency caesarean and weighing one pound and 13 ounces early on Friday morning.
The 31-year-old was barely six months pregnant - however, as reported by the Mirror, her mum April Newkirk has told WXIA-TV that Chance is "expected to be okay."
She added: "He's just fighting. We just want prayers for him."
According to the family, Adriana's harrowing medical ordeal began with severe headaches over four months ago.
She sought help at Atlanta's Northside Hospital in Georgia, US, but was refused treatment. She collapsed the following day and her boyfriend discovered her struggling to breathe.
She was then taken to Emory University Hospital, where she was found to have blood clots in her brain and was declared brain-dead while eight weeks into her pregnancy. April said the family plans to withdraw her daughter from life support this week.
The family say doctors at the hospital could not legally remove life-sustaining apparatus due to Georgia's laws that prohibit abortion once a foetal heartbeat is detected, typically at about six weeks of gestation.
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Georgia's Republican Attorney General Chris Carr clarified in a statement that the state's law doesn't compel medical professionals to maintain life support for a woman declared brain-dead.
Dr Dale Gardiner, an Intensive Care Consultant and member of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, said last month that the situation Adriana found herself in was highly unusual because life-support is not designed to be long-term treatment for brain-dead patients.
He said: "These patients are very physiologically unstable owing to the severity of their brain injury. They are all on intensive care.
"Normally mechanical ventilation and other intensive care interventions are only continued for a very short time to allow family to say goodbye or to enable organ donation (for example, up to a day). It is extremely unusual to continue beyond this point."
Her case has sparked anger around the world at the USA's anti-abortion laws, which were swept in at state level after the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of Roe vs Wade in 2022. Under Georgia's law - brought in by Republican politicians - abortion is banned after cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks gestation.

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