Six months after her daughter’s death, April Newkirk is still reliving the moment she learned her daughter, 31-year-old nurse Adriana Smith — then nine weeks pregnant with her second child — had been declared brain-dead. And yet, because her fetus still had a heartbeat, doctors kept Smith’s body on life support for four months.
In a heartbreaking interview with “Nightline,” Newkirk said the family was never given the authority to make decisions for Adriana in her final days.
“You know, you just want to scream, you just want to scream,” she said. “You know, she’s my daughter, my first daughter.”
Smith’s decline began with what her mother described as “really, really, really bad headaches.” Adriana went to the hospital and was sent home with a prescription “a little stronger than Tylenol,” but Newkirk said no CT scan was performed. Everything changed when Adriana became unresponsive.
“She was gasping,” Newkirk recalled.
A CT later revealed “blood clots everywhere… everywhere.”
Adriana never woke up. She was placed on life support on February 9 and declared brain-dead on February 19.
What happened next, Newkirk said, was dictated by Georgia’s abortion laws.
When asked whether doctors offered any options, she replied:
“The option was there’s a law in place and they have to follow the guidelines of the law. So I guess the heartbeat law… the baby did have a strong heartbeat. He was going to be treated as the patient, not Adriana.”
Doctors told the family they had no choice. Initially, with their hands tied, Newkirk says she and her family hoped for a miracle.
“Maybe she’ll come back to us,” Newkirk recalls thinking. “Maybe she’ll find her way back to us.”
But as the weeks passed, Newkirk said she watched her daughter’s body deteriorate.
“As time went on, she just started changing.”
Georgia’s LIFE Act bans most abortions around six weeks and defines fetuses as “living distinct persons.” But the law does not explicitly address cases where the pregnant person is legally dead. According to the Georgia attorney general’s office, “there is nothing… that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death.”
The legal fog hangs heavily over Newkirk’s experience.
“I feel like we should have had a choice, but we didn’t,” she said. “I really think it should be a choice. I just do.”
Despite the long odds — only four documented cases worldwide involve sustaining a pregnancy after brain death before 14 weeks— Adriana’s pregnancy continued for 16 weeks. In June, the hospital called Newkirk with news:
“They told me they have to do an emergency C-section… they’re in the process of doing it right now.”
Baby Chance was born weighing just 1 pound and 13 ounces.
Newkirk said she chose his name herself:
“Because I feel like he had a second chance.”
But Chance faces significant challenges.
“His lungs are underdeveloped,” Newkirk said. “He’s not your regular premature baby. She did not feed him through food that she ate. She was fed through IV. So there’s a big difference.”
“He’s struggling, but he’s gaining weight,” she continued. “He’s struggling with his breathing.”
Now six months old and weighing 11 pounds, Chance remains in the NICU and “still cannot breathe on his own,” Newkirk said.
After the emergency surgery, Adriana was finally taken off the ventilator.
“It was hard. It was hard. It was hard. It was hard,” she said, breaking down.
“And every day I think about her. Every day.”
Newkirk is now raising Adriana’s 7-year-old son, Chase. When he asks about his mother, she can only tell him:
“That God needed her more.”
But even in her grief, she insists her daughter would have wanted something different.
“She would have wanted for her parents to have a choice,” Newkirk said. “To make the decisions for her, because she couldn’t.”
As legal battles over reproductive rights continue nationwide, Adriana Smith’s story now stands at the intersection of medicine, morality, and law— a tragic example of what happens when families confronting unthinkable loss find their most intimate decisions shaped by policies they never consented to.
