Atlanta women’s health providers and abortion-rights advocates are speaking out against Georgia’s six-week abortion law as an Emory University Hospital patient recently declared “brain dead” remains on life support to sustain her pregnancy.
State law bans abortion after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, when an ultrasound detects cardiac activity in an embryo. There are medical exceptions allowed under the ban, including for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy.
But OB-GYN Dr. Zoe Lucier-Julian, director of clinical innovation and liberatory research at the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation, said at a press briefing Wednesday that the law’s language leaves a gray area that can lead to delayed treatment, especially for patients experiencing emergency complications.
“These laws create an environment of fear and attempt to coerce us as providers to align with the state, as opposed to aligning with our primary point of accountability — the patients that we work so hard to serve,” Lucier-Julian said.
In an emailed statement, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said, “There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death. Removing life support is not an action ‘with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.’”
But April Newkirk, the Emory patient Adriana Smith’s mother, told 11Alive that’s what happened to her daughter after doctors conducted a scan at the hospital revealing multiple blood clots.
Newkirk did not respond to WABE requests for an interview.
“So they had asked me if they could do a procedure to relieve them, and I said yes. Well then they called me back and they said that they couldn’t do it,” she told 11Alive.
Doctors at other facilities had previously sent her daughter home from the ER after she sought care for a severe, persistent headache, Newkirk said.
“Adriana complained about a headache days prior and traveled to two hospitals, but was given medication with no tests ran or proper examination,” the family’s gofundme page reads, “then Sunday morning she was found unresponsive … suddenly Adriana was declared brain dead Feb. 19.”
Later, Emory doctors decided to keep Newkirk’s daughter on life support to sustain the fetus, she said.
“And I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy, but what I’m saying is we should have had a choice,” she told 11Alive.
She said she worries for the health of her unborn grandson, and her daughter’s 7-year old son.
Emory officials released a statement:
“Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws,” the health system wrote in the statement. “Our top priorities continue to be the safety and well-being of the patients we serve.”
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