It’s not about the supposed cruelty of life support for Adriana Smith or the chance of survival for her newborn son, Chance. What opponents resent most is what the situation implies for their own lives.
In fact, the lower the chance of survival for Chance, the more optimistic abortion advocates are. Smith, 30 years old at the time, was declared brain-dead in February after suffering the effects of blood clots in her brain. She was pregnant, so she was kept on life support until the baby reached a healthier gestational age. The Georgia laws keeping her alive became an object of ire for members of the pro-abortion camp, most of whom claimed that Smith was a functional “incubator,” and that the process was obviously against what she would have wished.
Attackers of Smith’s situation had recourse to the same line of reasoning that obscured the case of Amber Thurman, another Georgia mother, who died after taking the abortion pill. Flat-out lies brought about the conclusion that Georgia’s abortion bans killed Thurman. Presently, the same advocates claim that Georgia’s pro-life laws prolonged Smith’s suffering and turned her body into a tool.
Not so: Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, instituted in 2022, bans abortion after six weeks, with few exceptions. According to Live Action, the LIFE Act defines abortion as “an act done with the purpose of terminating a woman’s pregnancy,” and removal from life support does not fall into this category. Further back, Georgia’s Advance Directive for Health Care Act of 2007 made removing a pregnant woman from life support illegal “unless her preborn child isn’t viable” and she “has an advance directive that states her wishes to be withdrawn from life-sustaining measures.”
Chance was born at around 25 weeks, and Smith was removed from life support and died. The outcome is a worst-case scenario for people who were opposed to the whole process, not because the child has lost his mother and because the rest of his relatives have lost a beloved, but because Chance has a good shot at surviving and living a healthy life.
Pro-abortion women on X have plainly said that his survival “is one of the worst outcomes.” Another responded to say, “I still hope the baby doesn’t survive more than a day or two.”
Even more explicit, one said: “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.”
Given, then, that abortion had no legal hand in the situation, and that Smith’s mother has been clear that “we want her to have her baby,” all that these abortion advocates are lamenting is the manifestation of human life. They entirely reject the female capacity for human life because they reject the notion that it is what they were made for. This goes so far as to neutralize the concept of “woman” into one no different from “man” — legally, practically, and even to the point of transgenderism arguing there is no such thing as “woman” or “man.”
But that is, quite literally, a dead end. To live for nothing else is an empty life, one shown by the fact that conservatives exceed liberals in happiness by at least 10 percentage points in every demographic. Conservatives who make less than $30,000 per year hit the same happiness level as liberals who make $100,000 or more per year. The gap mostly comes down to religiosity and associated life choices, but it’s not just about statistics. As exhibited by the above comments, to be pro-abortion and broadly liberal is to have a preference for death. That’s a dark place to be.
Death’s political allies cover their preferences with calls for “empathy” and “joy” as counters to the dreaded Handmaid’s Tale. The reality, of course, is that we are already experiencing this existential issue through the well-sanctioned practices of burqas and surrogacy.
These incredibly inconsistent and self-hating women are the ones we are told to “trust,” and to do so beyond all intuition and conscientiousness. So we are at the very evil point of societal hatred for men and for women. The natural answer to this problem is to scapegoat life itself.