“Her brain is gone, they say. ‘Redacted’ is just a vessel now, and the baby is all that matters. I suppose it’s all that ever mattered.” After hearing this, the question is, is this from fiction or reality?

And sadly it is both.

Headlines broke out in May of this year, “Brain-dead woman must carry fetus to birth because of Georgia’s abortion ban, hospital tells family.” Adriana Smith, a thirty year old nurse, suffered from blood clots in her brain and was pronounced brain-dead in February. She had no say, and her family, the people with say, requested her to be taken off life support, but the hospital would not allow it as Adrianna was 8 weeks pregnant, and the fetus would not survive if breathing tubes and medicine were not pumped into her lifeless body. Even in death, Adriana’s body was used against her will.

To make matters even worse, the Smith’s family were forced to pay the medical bills for a decision they did not make. They had to watch their daughter’s corpse rot while trying to provide life that she did not have. The fetus did not have a high likelihood of surviving this “incubation” and even if he did he may be blind, might not be able to walk, and may not survive once he’s born. It was torture for them and Adriana’s 7 year old son, who thought his mom was just sleeping—and that she would wake up soon.

When Georgia State Senator Ed Setzler was asked what he thought of the matter, he stated, “It is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child. I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think there’s a valuable human life that we have an opportunity to save and I think it’s the right thing to save it.”

Was Adriana’s life not an innocent human’s life? Was her life not a valuable human life? Does she not get to receive the same autonomy that the unborn fetus inside of her gets?

Chance was taken from his mother’s corpse in June of this year, after almost four months of Adriana being on life support. He weighed 1.3 pounds and had to be admitted into the NICU immediately. He most likely suffered from brain damage and may need breathing support for the rest of his life— if he makes it out of the NICU.

The most recent update about Chance, found on GoFundMe.Com, is that Chance is now 11 pounds, and still in the NICU. He will be moved to a new hospital “for more help with his health.” April Newkirk, Adriana’s mother, put out a statement after the birth of her grandson saying, “I want them to know that this didn’t have to happen. I want them to know that the law needs to be changed. It doesn’t need to be altered. It doesn’t need to be in effect at all. Women have rights; it’s their body.”

Women have rights, yet the rights they have are no longer over their bodies, as their bodies now belong to the government. This situation did not have to happen. Politicians, specifically male (derogatory) politicians, should have no say in women’s healthcare. Women’s healthcare should be between women and their doctors, and they should be able to make the best decision for themselves.

The quote from the beginning is from the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the book by Margaret Atwood. The book was written in 1974, and the first season released in 2017, far earlier than Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. Now, Atwood is not a seer, or a predictor of times to come, she is a writer who thought that it would be interesting to write a speculative fiction about how prevalent Christianity is in the United States of America and to see how the American people would feel about the country turning into a theocratic dictatorship.

As a woman in current day America, it is alarming to see how real The Handmaid’s Tale is. Ofmathew, the woman that is brain dead, is a black woman just like Adrianna Smith. It is disgusting to know that Native American and black women are statistically more likely to die during childbirth, and are most affected by the abortion ban. Unlike what politicians would want you to believe, they further proved their white supremacy by taking the autonomy from a dead black woman and used her as an experiment to further their own racist, twisted agenda.

They do not care about Chance and all the other fetuses, they only care to see how far they can go to completely control women, and will use people of color as their stepping stone.

Atwood never expected her fiction to become a reality.