Three years ago, the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in the US. There are now partial abortion bans in 41 states, with total bans in 13 of them, and the consequences have been devastating in more ways than one. Due to abortion bans, we now live in a world where doctors hesitate to give—or deny altogether—relatively simple life-saving medications and procedures to women or anyone who can become pregnant.
Adriana Smith, a young Black mother in Georgia, a state with one of the strictest bans on abortions, made headlines for the science-fiction-level inhumanity that she and her family suffered at the hands of an abortion ban. Smith was eight weeks pregnant when she suffered a sudden stroke which left her brain dead. Without consulting her family, the hospital left her on life support, which in essence made her a human incubator for a fetus that at the time was the size of a raspberry.
Georgia’s LIFE Act prohibits abortions after six weeks. Even where there are “exceptions” to bans, for example to save the life of the mother, doctors and hospitals are often hesitant because of fear of legal repercussions. In Smith’s case, the hospital staff made the decision to use a woman’s essentially dead body to attempt to grow a baby inside of her—leaping across the line of morality and ignoring all that goes into forming a healthy baby. The child was delivered via C-section at 24 weeks, weighing less than 2 pounds when they finally took Adriana off of life support.
After being told they could not legally consider other options for Smith’s treatment, her family was slapped with a hospital bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars for the time Smith spent on life support.
The Atlantic wrote, “In the most extreme interpretation of the law, one can imagine an entire ward filled with dead women on ventilators, their bodies being used as incubators for tiny embryos.” If that were to happen anywhere, it would be in the United States, where the maternal mortality rate is more than four times higher than, for example, in the UK. As shocking as that is, it is even worse for Black mothers, who die at a rate of more than double the US average.
Before her stroke, Smith had gone to a hospital after developing severe headaches, and doctors sent her home with medication. They did not give her a CT scan or keep her overnight for observation, but a scan would have revealed multiple blood clots in her brain that led to her stroke. It is no secret that racism and misogyny pose an enormous crisis in the field of medicine, where the symptoms experienced by Black women in particular are frequently ignored and lead to their early deaths.
Tragically, Smith is not alone. Amber Thurman, another Georgia mother, recently died because doctors hesitated to treat sepsis caused by complications from an abortion pill, leaving her six-year-old child motherless.
Democrats & The Courts Can’t Protect Us
It’s not just people in right-wing-controlled states who are facing deadly attacks on reproductive healthcare. Even in a place like New York, where the right to abortion exists, a doctor was sued for using telehealth services to prescribe an abortion pill to a patient from Texas. The Texas State Attorney General is pushing New York officials to make the doctor pay a fine of over $100,000. The ultra-conservative Supreme Court is expected to side with Texas, which would immediately end the remote telehealth prescriptions of abortion medication to pregnant people in states with bans.
It is clear we cannot rely on the courts to fix this problem, and a Democrat was president when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the first place. The Democratic Party did nothing to protect us and won’t take any real action to bring back reproductive rights on the federal level. And to be clear, that is what Americans want. Currently 63% of people say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Free Healthcare For All
Not only should abortion and reproductive healthcare be legal, but it should be free! Families like Adriana Smith’s should never again have to rely on GoFundMe to raise money for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. We need to rebuild a mass movement in the streets, which is how abortion rights were won in the first place, and a new party that actually fights for working-class people.
We need a party made up of workers, students, and mothers that will fight for policies that will save lives—things like free and immediately accessible abortion care, gender-affirming care, postpartum care, and childcare. We need a party that won’t take any money from billionaires or big business and will actively build movements against the far right and the rotten capitalist system they defend. Only an all-out, working-class struggle for a socialist world will be enough to truly prevent another death like Adriana Smith’s.
