It’s kind of funny when headline writers are so clueless and biased that what they think is a “res ipsa loquitur” story proving one thing actually reveals something completely different.
The headline on a Times op-ed ed last week was “A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.” (I’m using my last gift link of the month on this one, so you’d better read it!) The writer was Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School.
The entire piece radiates contempt for the concept of treating the unborn as human lives, which, you know, they are and rather undeniably so. Readers are informed that Adriana Smith is brain dead, and has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days to save the life of her baby. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she died from multiple blood clots in her brain.
“Her fetus’s heart continued to beat,” writes the professor, as if it was an abandoned car with a functioning carburetor. Georgia, she explains, is one of those crazy, fetus-worshiping states where a nascent human being is deemed a human life that can’t be snuffed out on a whim if it has a heartbeat. This, to the op-ed’s author, the headline writer and the New York Times is completely unfathomable.
“Legislators did not seem to have considered a situation in which a pregnant woman is legally dead,” she sneers. Funny, I don’t see why the death of the mother compels the decision that the child she is carrying should be considered a non-person and a life not worth saving. The professor quotes the dead woman’s mother as saying, “We want the baby. That’s a part of my daughter. But the decision should have been left to us — not the state.” Wait: don’t we all believe that it is a proper function of the state to protect the lives of human beings and to pass laws that embody that duty? Do families have the option of letting the children of parents who are killed die from neglect because it’s the family’s “choice”?
What is stunning (depressing, annoying, telling) about Mutcherson’s essay is that she can’t grasp why anyone would argue that a brain dead mother should be kept alive so a vulnerable human being can become strong enough to live a life outside her womb. Many quotes in the op-ed make that clear, like…
- “Reproductive justice advocates have long been clear that abortion law is never only about abortion. It is about the exercise of control over all pregnant women, regardless of whether they plan to carry their pregnancies to term. That’s why the anti-abortion movement has pursued a broad agenda of legal personhood for embryos and fetuses.” My comment: “The Horror”! These misguided people think that a human being’s life should be saved if at all possible. The monsters! This is the “It isn’t what it is,” “Handmaiden’s Tale” propaganda of the political left, not objective analysis. Anti-abortion advocates think that living human beings shouldn’t be killed, that’s all. The position has nothing to do with “controlling” the people who want to kill them any more than laws against murder are “about the exercise of control” over citizens who would like to kill someone.
- “This kind of catastrophic event was inevitable, given the expansive and imprecise laws written by legislators who generally lack medical expertise, and the inability of politicians to fully predict every emergency situation.” My comment: The professor isn’t referring to the mother’s death as the “catastrophic event,” but rather the brain dead woman’s body being kept functioning so her baby can be born. I can conceive of valid arguments for why this should be considered bad policy or a situation requiring special legislation. But what’s the catastrophe? The author is incapable of comprehending that in a utilitarian analysis, a Kantian analysis favoring human life, and reciprocity principles (“If you were the fetus, what would you want the hospital to do?”), the situation is thoroughly defensible.
- “Emory University Hospital, once Ms. Smith’s place of employment, would not be legally allowed to remove organs from a brain-dead person without family consent if this person hadn’t previously registered her wish to be a donor, even if doing so could save or improve dozens of lives. However, according to Ms. Smith’s mother, the hospital informed her that, because of the fetus her daughter was carrying, it could not legally withdraw the artificial means of keeping her body functioning.” My comment: So? The professor thinks that’s an apt analogy: the dead woman’s organs can’t be harvested without her prior consent, so they will be allowed to die along with her. But a liver isn’t a human being. Never mind; abortion advocates can’t concede that what is at stake in an abortion decision is a second human life. If they do, they know what abortion becomes.
- “Knowing the tremendous work that the body of a pregnant woman must do to sustain and nourish a pregnancy, the harm to the fetus from being trapped inside a body without a functioning brain cannot be known with certainty.” My comment: Consequentialism, the refuge of the ethically inert: “It’s a bad decision because it might not work.”
Mutcherson concludes by calling the situation “dystopian”—there’s “The Handmaiden’s Tale” mentality again. She can see no benefit or reason to try to save a human life. Bias has not only rendered her stupid, but so morally and ethically blind she can’t see the other side of a genuine ethics conflict.
Ethics Alarms 
Are we supposed to assume Adriana Smith wanted an abortion?
There’s no suggestion of that at all.
The baby is wanted, the GA AG issued a statement the law’s language doesn’t require life support, and the family is spared a difficult decision of the exact type the article’s conclusion is clutching pearls over.
Talk about grasping at straws.
With as much trust should be afforded to the media, the likely truth is probably more along the lines of the hospital’s ethics board making the decision, and challenging that would be as simple as requesting a transfer to an unaffiliated hospice care.
I want to say we have a cultural schizophrenia around pregnancy, where on the one hand we’re aborting babies to the tune of a million a year, but we’re also developing all kinds of techniques to grow babies outside of wombs, implant babies into wombs that are not their mother’s, and probably even to implant wombs in men so they can be officially pregnant. But this all has a very common thread, which is only have babies when we want them, in the way we want them. Babies in our culture a commodity. Bought when wanted, discarded when not.
The thrust of this article, though, is not that it is horrific that a dead mother is being kept on machines to provide her baby a chance to live. The horrific part, according to the author of the paper, is that the Georgia law is forcing the hospital to do so, regardless of what anyone wants. That the baby’s grandparents are on board with the process is irrelevant: because the state mandates it, it is happening, and the horror is that if the grandparents decided to pull the plug on their daughter, the hospital simply couldn’t do it.
I would have to examine the exact text of the Georgia law, but I’m willing to bet this is a carefully staged outrage that is malicious compliance at best, but most likely deliberate deception about what the law requires in actuality. Even if the Georgia law prevents all abortions, I would hazard the hospital could still legally pull the plug on the brain-dead mother, because a fetus dying is not what makes an abortion.
We’ve seen this tactic time and again from the pro-choice advocates. They trot forward a woman whose baby died in utero and claim that the law prevented hospitals from doing a dilation and evacuation because it was prohibited by abortion laws. But that was a bunch of bovine excrement. The D&E process is fully legitimate in and of itself. A dead baby can be evacuated from the womb because the baby is already dead. But the pro-choice advocates want to steer around that little detail, because otherwise they have to face what abortion really is: the deliberate killing of an unborn child. On the flip side, pro-choice advocates claim that if abortions were illegal, every miscarriage would have to be investigated as a potential murder. Once again, this is bovine excrement, because even standard legal processes don’t treat every death as a potential murder.
Abortion is the deliberate killing of an unborn child. It is not an abortion if the child otherwise dies. It is an abortion to kill a fetus to cure preeclampsia. It is an abortion to kill a fetus that has defects that make it unlikely to survive. It is not an abortion to surgical remove a cancerous uterus, even knowing the fetus will die from the procedure. It is not an abortion to surgically remove a Fallopian tube where a fetus has improperly implanted, even knowing that the fetus will die. It is not an abortion to remove all the extraordinary measures keeping the brain-dead mother alive, even knowing the fetus will also die.
Perhaps the Georgia law is poorly written, and it doesn’t delineate what is an abortion and what isn’t. But the article does include a statement from the Georgia attorney general’s office that nothing in George law forced the hospital to keep the brain-dead woman alive. Specifically, they said, “Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.” So it seems to me that the Georgia law is in accord with what I’ve written above.
I wonder what other details are being obfuscated or outright hidden in this story. How is that, when our medical technology can keep a dead woman’s body operating for the sake of her unborn child, that we could cry “Dystopia!” instead of singing with Paul Simon:
Abortion bans are not unprecedented in history. Prior to 1973, many states have had abortion bans for decades.
Courts would not be short of precedent if called to interpret laws outlawing abortion.
This topic has been visited before:
https://ethicsalarms.com/2014/01/09/the-strange-case-of-the-brain-dead-mother-to-be/
This time, I remembered that, especially since the linked op-ed mentioned the earlier case. But the issues were different, as was the context: that earlier case was before Roe was abandoned.
But you have convinced me to post that essay again.
At what point does the fetus become the patient? It seems to me that a pregnant woman who is hospitalized for any reason requires the doctors to consider the potential baby as much as it does to treat the mother. If that were not the case, there would never be a need to warn women, if pregnant, not to take some medications. If the mother dies the baby still has a chance for survival given available technologies.
I shared your article across several usenet newsgroups and Dr. Chung gave a response.
https://talk.abortion.narkive.com/4bMtPFY2/re-abortion-another-bias-makes-you-stupid-op-ed-in-the-nyt#post2
I have a slightly problem with his exegesis, in that David and Bathsheba were not cursed with a full-term abortion. The baby was born, and then became ill and died, no matter how much fasting and mourning David did. It cannot even be said that this was infanticide. God permitted the child to be stricken with illness, and did not actively save the child. If we moderns are wanting to be precise with terminology for legal purposes, conflating what happened to David and Bathsheba’s child cannot be called abortion.