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In this episode Trent reviews the ethics surrounding a recent case of keeping a brain-dead woman alive to save her unborn child as well as the monstrous responses to this case by pro-abortion advocates.
New Symposium to Address Challenging Questions about Brain Death
Transcription:
Trent:
On June 13th, Adriana Smith who had been declared brain dead back in February gave birth to a baby boy named Chance, but now some pro-abortion advocates are hoping this baby dies so that they can promote their twisted ideology. In today’s episode, we’re going to examine this story and the responses to it, including a response from one prominent pro-lifer who did not support these efforts to save baby chance’s life. To start, here’s a new story about the incident. Back in May before Chance was born,
CLIP:
April Newkirk expressed in her GoFundMe appeal that Adriana was declared brain dead on February 19th, her mother riding due to expecting her unborn child. She will be kept on life support due to heartbeat law in Georgia, but sadden to know we had no say so. Regarding her lifeless body and unborn child, Georgia’s heartbeat law bans abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy when a heartbeat con first be detected. It was signed into law by Governor Kemp in 2019.
Trent:
There’s a lot of misinformation when it comes to this case. First, the Georgia Attorney General’s office said this decision had nothing to do with Georgia’s ban on abortions. They 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. Second, this seems to be a consequence of older case laws in Georgia. Back in 1987, the Georgia Superior Court ruled in the case of another brain dead pregnant woman, Donna Pazi, that quote, based on case law and on Georgia statutes only the mother has the right to terminate a quickened non-viable fetus, and that public policy requires the maintenance of life support systems for a brain dead mother as long as there exists a reasonable possibility that the fetus may develop and survive.
In 2007, Georgia passed the Advanced Directive for Healthcare Act, which standardized how people could say what medical care they do or don’t want if they’re incapacitated. The form said that unless a woman positively indicates she does not want to be on life support while pregnant, then the state will presume that she should be kept alive for the benefit of her child and there is no evidence. Smith had an advanced directive saying she wanted to be taken off of life support if she were pregnant. Third, I’m assuming for the sake of the argument that Smith was truly dead. Many Catholic bioethicists are skeptical of brain death diagnoses being equivalent to a true diagnosis of death. As can be seen in a recent symposium held on the subject by the National Catholic Bioethics Center that I’ll link to below, but I’ll just assume for the sake of the argument, Smith was biologically dead and all that remained was Smith’s body. Fourth, many people are claiming Smith’s family tried to remove her life support the hospital officials backed by state authorities refuse to do so, but the family has only said in interviews that they wished they had the choice to do this, not that they were actually going to do it.
CLIP:
And I’m not saying that we would’ve chose to terminate her pregnancy. What I’m saying is we should have had a choice.
Trent:
And in fact in other interviews they said that they wanted this baby to live.
CLIP:
So at that point we continued with the pregnancy that we didn’t have a choice or say about, and I just want to be clear on something. We want her to have her baby. We want her life to continue throughout her children, but at the same time, to see her lady like that for that length of time, the grieving process for us, it can’t even start. They named her daughter’s baby chance because to me he’s getting a second
Trent:
Chance. So let’s look at the situation. Adriana Smith is dead. Her rights as a human person cannot be violated. Smith’s family wants her baby to live. The hospital wants the baby to live, and that is what has happened. Here’s the reason news story. Updating the situation.
CLIP:
They say that she will be taken off life support at 2:00 PM today, and while they’re preparing to grieve her, they’re also holding on to the tiniest bit of hope and that is her newborn baby chance. Baby Chance was born just last Friday on June 13th, delivered by emergency C-section at just 25 weeks and he’s now in the nicu. His mother, Adriana Smith, was declared brain dead back in February, eight weeks into her pregnancy after suffering blood clots in her brain. Adriana’s mother April Newkirk says today, her baby is fighting for a chance at life.
He’s fighting. He’s in the Nick unit, he’s about one pound, 13 ounces, and he’s expected to be okay. He’s just fighting. We just want for him.
Trent:
So no one’s rights or requests are being violated in this case, and yet the replies from pro-abortion advocates are truly sickening. Here’s one post that got nearly 2 million views, which says, I might be a monster for saying this, but I don’t want that child to live because if it grows to live and have a decent life, then we as women are doomed to never escape the role of an incubator. Adriana Smith was an experiment of a country that hates its women, and this post that got over 4 million views says, I still hope the baby doesn’t survive more than another day or two. People are seriously not understanding the precedent across the country that will happen if the baby survives. It really is the absolute worst thing that can happen. Actually, the worst thing that can happen is that posts like these aren’t ratioed. Instead, tens of thousands of people liked posts that openly hoped for a baby to die.
It’s no wonder St. Paul said in second Corinthians four, four, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ. So Paul is referring to Satan as the God of this world because of how much control he has over this world. And indeed it’s sickening to see how evil seemingly regular people can be. So we need to pray that God’s Holy Spirit, which is infinitely more powerful than Satan will free these people from his demonic power. And you see this power on display when pro aborts bend over backwards to say that this child wasn’t really born and so they still want to deny his humanity even after birth.
CLIP:
They kept a corpse active until they could pull the fetus from the vessel. That is it against her family’s wishes, against her own end of life wishes her family will now be forced to take care of a child that they were not prepared for and saddled with the medical bills. How can you look me in the eye and tell me everything about this isn’t evil?
Trent:
If Jeff Foxworthy were a pro-life apologist, I think he’d say to this individual, if you think it’d be better to kill a baby in the womb than pay doctors to save his life, you might be a moral monster. And the prophet Isaiah would say, woe to those who call evil good and good evil who put darkness for light and light for darkness. Here’s how pro-abortion logic works. First, they don’t care about truth because there’s no evidence Smith or her family want to end this child’s life. In fact, there’s evidence to the contrary. And second, the child is a baby to them if they want that particular child to live, and it’s a fetus being pulled from a vessel if they want the child to die, even if the child is two seconds away from being born or has already been born, they just slap the label fetus onto the child to justify murder, which is also dumb because the Latin word fetus just means offspring or young one. It’s like saying it’s okay to kill newborn children because they’re just neonates. The Latin word for newborns. This is also incredibly disrespectful to mothers who have fought for their lives and their children’s lives in these kinds of circumstances. Melanie Pritchard is a pro-life advocate who trained me to do pro-life work when I was just 18 years old. In 2010, she suffered a medical emergency while pregnant and was declared clinically dead. Here’s her story depicted on the Christian Broadcast Network.
CLIP:
Melanie Pritchard was rushed to the operating room where a team of doctors performed an emergency C-section. Melanie was dying from an amniotic fluid embolism, a rare allergic reaction during pregnancy that caused her heart and lungs to shut down a well-known pro-life activist. Melanie was now fighting for her own life.
My wife was clinically dead when they delivered my daughter, they thought there was absolutely no way that she could come back, that she looked deader than dead.
Trent:
Thankfully, Melanie and her baby who is now a teenager are doing just fine. In fact, they visited us at our home just a few weeks ago, but we don’t say that a fetus was extracted from my friend. The doctors saved her baby’s life and Melanie gave birth, which we usually say out of respect to people who have medically indicated C-sections, they still endured the trials of birth. Hey, real fast at this point, a lot of people would say in a video, here’s the word from our sponsor, but I love that our supporters are so generous. We don’t need sponsorships. We can just focus on sharing and defending the Catholic faith. And if you want to help us to keep doing that, please hit the subscribe button and support us@trenthornpodcast.com. Where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you make all of this possible without any sponsorships.
And now back to the episode. Now I do want to be clear though that not everybody who was uncomfortable with keeping Smith’s body alive to save her child are monstrous ghouls. Some of them have just made a mistake in their moral reasoning when they started from some correct moral presuppositions but then ended up at the wrong answer. In this case, for example, here is what pro-life advocate Abby Johnson wrote on her ex account. Let’s go through it part by part. This was written before Chance was born. I know I’m the very odd man out in this Georgia situation where a woman is being essentially used as an incubator to keep a child alive. She was pronounced brain dead when her unborn child was nine weeks along and she’s being kept artificially alive for now over 11 weeks in order to continue the pregnancy. First, the language of this mother being used as an incubator is dehumanizing.
The only other people I see using this kind of language are pro-abortion advocates Smith was not being treated like an object. Her ability to mother her child was extended for the child’s good. Johnson continues. I have a huge ethical problem with this. Death is natural. Keeping people alive by dehumanizing the mother into the form of an incubator is in my opinion, unethical and dehumanizing. First, it’s true death is not natural in the sense that God never wanted any of us to die. It’s a curse brought about by original sin. However, death is a natural part of our corrupted nature, and so we should be prepared to welcome death when it is our natural time to die. Although in some cases we are permitted or even required to extend a person’s life. For example, we use CPR and other basic medical interventions to extend life in ways we could not have done even a hundred years ago.
We also keep bodies from decomposing for organ donation and the catechism says Organ donation after death is a noble am meritorious act and is to be encouraged as an expression of generous solidarity. But just because we can extend a person’s life doesn’t mean that we should. You could keep a person’s body from decomposing for a very long time after he has died, but you’d need a good reason to justify this kind of expensive intervention, especially if you claim it is obligatory or that you must do it. The catechism says in paragraph 2300 that the bodies of the dead must be treated with respect and charity in faith and hope of the resurrection. The of the dead is a corporal work of mercy. It honors the children of God who are temples of the Holy Spirit. This is why the Catholic church prohibits the scattering of ashes, though it now allows cremation as long as the ashes are treated with reverence.
If Smith or another mother in a similar situation explicitly asked for her body to be kept alive so that her child could be born, we would not consider that disrespectful. It would be heroic. I can’t imagine Abby would say that a woman who chooses to do this has somehow disrespected her own body and turned herself into an incubator. She continues. Women are not made to have babies. Even if they are dead, natural death is okay. Life and death are two places in medicine where we have gone too far. We have created too many ways to create life and we have created too many ways to extend life instead of letting people peacefully die. I think what Abby means is that women aren’t meant to have babies if they’re dead. And that’s true in the sense that we aren’t meant to do anything when we’re dead except to be laid to rest and await the resurrection from the dead.
But as we saw, we can keep bodies from decomposing if we have good reasons for doing that. That’s why I have no respect for these pro-abortion advocates who clutch their pearls over Smith being kept from decomposing so her baby could live, but don’t raise a similar fuss at things like the body’s exhibit, which puts corpses on display for people to gawk at corpses, which were probably executed Chinese political prisoners. Multiple bishops have also criticized the body’s exhibit and canceled Catholic school field trips to it. Pro boards don’t say anything when bodies are kept from decomposing. So people who buy tickets can watch them in baseball poses. But if a pregnant woman’s body is kept alive so that her baby won’t die, suddenly it’s an affront to human dignity. This just shows they aren’t pro-choice. They are pro-abortion. Now, Abby does make a good point that we can become obsessed with keeping people alive even when that’s not prudent.
The pro-life position is not that every human life must be extended as long as possible. It’s simply that it’s wrong to directly kill an innocent person. Abortion and active euthanasia are two examples of this, but passive euthanasia or killing someone by depriving him of basic means of life is also evil. In the ancient world, unwanted children were often killed by simply abandoning them in the wilderness and Christians became famous or infamous depending on who you would’ve asked for rescuing those children. Murder is wrong, whether it’s done through direct means of violence or even indirect means like starvation or dehydrating someone to death like when Terry Schivos husband removed her feeding tube in order to bring about her death. This can also be the case if you remove medical interventions like surgery that are necessary to provide someone with their basic needs like food and water.
Consider this article from Time Magazine written in 1983 on April 9th, 1982, an infant who became known to the world only as baby do was born in Bloomington, Indiana. He had an incomplete esophagus and down syndrome, which causes moderate to severe mental retardation. Thanks to advances in neonatal medicine, surgeons could ensure baby dose survival by attaching his esophagus to his stomach, but nothing could be done to prevent retardation. His parents were confronted with an agonizing dilemma to ascent to an operation that would save the life of a child who could be hopelessly retarded or to allow him to die of starvation against the wishes of their pediatrician and hospital. They chose the latter. The parent’s right to this choice was twice challenged in the courts by the hospital and twice upheld on April 15th, baby Doe died. Language often becomes taboo when we want to reject the evils embedded in that language.
So for example, we don’t say the N word because as a society we want to move away from evils like slavery and segregation that were associated with calling black people this word. Likewise, we’re moving away from the R word, which isn’t as bad since you can still say things like fire retardant, but it’s still an insensitive word because that word is associated with violating the dignity of mentally handicapped people. In 1984, baby Doe laws were passed to the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to keep murders like this from happening in the future. The case in Georgia we’ve discussed does involve pro-life issues, but it’s more about euthanasia than abortion. But in order to show when the removal of medical care becomes the evil of euthanasia, we need to understand the bioethical concepts of proportionate and disproportionate care. Laypeople sometimes use the terms ordinary and extraordinary care to make this distinction, but this can lead to a misunderstanding.
It’s not the nature of the care that matters. A ventilator is extraordinary medical intervention. Most people never need one. It’s extraordinary. But in some cases, turning a ventilator off can be murder like when you have moral certainty that a patient will be able to breathe on his own in a few days. Surgery is also extraordinary, but sometimes it is obligatory as we saw in the Baby Doe case. In contrast, food is an ordinary means of our survival, but people who are suffering from organ failure that will soon lead to death, for many of them eating will be very painful. And so it’s listed to not provide them food when they refuse it. We need to instead ask if the treatment for a patient is proportionate, not whether it’s ordinary or extraordinary, but proportionate or disproportionate for their care. According to the ethical and religious directives or Catholic healthcare services, a person may forego extraordinary or disproportionate means of preserving life.
Disproportionate means are those that in the patient’s judgment do not offer a reasonable hope of benefit or entail an excessive burden or impose excessive expense on the or the community. If Smith weren’t pregnant, then this level of care she was receiving would be disproportionate. But if we’d say it would be morally required to give this same level of care to Smith’s child after birth for a few months until he was healthy again, then we should provide this same level of care to this same child before birth. The presence of Smith’s body in the process doesn’t burden Smith because she’s deceased, though it does add more of an emotional burden to Smith’s family. However, that burden would not justify depriving Smith’s child of the treatment he needed so that he could continue to grow and live like any other child in the womb. So while I appreciate Abby Johnson’s concern about mandating medical treatments at the end of life that are not morally required in cases like this, our concern to protect unborn children would justify requiring this treatment unless there was an extreme circumstance to make treatment disproportionate.
But in general, as I said, if we provide this equipment to temporarily save the life of a born child, then we should do the same for an unborn child. Finally, some people on the comments of Abby’s Post said that her bad take on this issue is why men should lead the pro-life movement rather than women. I also saw similar claims a few months ago that men should be in public pro-life work and not women. When Samantha Craven was attacked while interviewing a pro-choice woman first, there are plenty of men that have had bad takes on pro-life issues, but that doesn’t mean men shouldn’t be pro-life activists. One of the best pro-life debaters I know is Stephanie Great Connors, who I’d be happy to have fill in for me if I couldn’t do a debate. And it was written several great pro-life books. Second, it’s a bit paranoid to say that women shouldn’t ever be allowed to take risks.
Many sidewalk counselors at abortion facilities are women and they know a crazy person might attack them, but they’re willing to take that risk to save babies. Since many women who go to abortion facilities might be uncomfortable talking to a male sidewalk counselor and prefer to speak to a woman offering help instead. And there’s a fairly even split between men and women leading pro-life groups. Though most pregnancy centers are run by women because it’s a woman oriented ministry. But if you feel like there aren’t enough men in the pro-life movement, the answer isn’t to ask qualified women to step aside. It’s to encourage the men to go out and do pro-life work. I felt compelled to do that when I was in my early twenties, which is why I fundraised to be a pro-life missionary and pro-life men should consider doing the same thing. You may not agree with everything Lila Rose does, which is fine, but you can at least respect that she started live action when she was 15 years old, and over the course of 23 years, she has grown it into one of the largest pro-life educational organizations in the country.
And we’re seeing fruits of this outreach in things like new research showing a 10 point drop in support for abortion among young people. The data also shows that the number of young men who identify as pro-choice has dropped significantly. And so I’d be thrilled to see more pro-life men helping and leading campus pro-life groups or engaging in pro-life activism in their local communities at abortion. I’d be happy to partner with them to do things like host a campus debate on abortion or give away copies of my book Persuasive Pro-Life, which I’d also recommend for anyone to engage with this issue. And if you’d like to learn more about how to address the bioethical issues race in today’s episode, check out the National Catholic Bioethics Center website and the books on assisted suicide by Stephanie Gray, Connors Life Issues Medical Choices by Janet Smith and Chris Kor and Catholic Bioethics in The Gift of Life by William May. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.