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A brain-dead pregnant woman is being kept alive, raising ethical questions
Wed, 21 May 2025
A pregnant woman in Georgia is being kept alive as a hospital navigates the state’s abortion laws. The family is speaking out. The Guardian has the story. Kentucky is still grappling with the aftermath of intense tornadoes, as well as dealing with more storm systems. USA Today reports on how cuts to the National Weather Service have led to scrambles to cover important shifts. And PBS Newshour also highlights the impact of cuts on the service. New Oklahoma school standards include a requirement to teach students misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Beth Wallis, education reporter with StateImpact Oklahoma, joins to discuss how and why this happened. Plus, France, the U.K., and Canada united to condemn Israel, lawyers accused Trump administration of defying courts to send migrants to South Sudan, and the NBA conference finals are set to begin. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu. Correction: A previous version of this episode cited comments the U.N. humanitarian chief made to the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die in the next 48 hours if they do not receive aid. The BBC has since updated that reporting to reflect that a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification estimates that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition could occur among children in Gaza ages 6 to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026.
Chapter 1: What ethical issues arise from keeping a brain-dead pregnant woman alive?
But first, to an issue that abortion rights activists have spent years warning about, laws that restrict abortion or give legal rights to fetuses can lead to scenarios where the rights of the person who is pregnant get pitted against the fetus they're carrying.
Chapter 2: How are Georgia's abortion laws affecting medical decisions?
We're seeing this play out in Georgia right now, where over the last few months, a hospital has been keeping a brain-dead pregnant woman alive so she can carry her pregnancy to term. Under Georgia law, abortion is banned in most cases after about six weeks of pregnancy.
Chapter 3: What happened to Adriana Smith and her medical treatment?
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, went to a hospital in February when she was eight weeks pregnant with an intense headache. Her mother told the local NBC affiliate 11 Alive what happened next.
They gave us a medication, but they didn't do any tests. They didn't do any CT scans. If they did, they would have caught it.
What doctors had seemingly missed were blood clots in her brain. She was discharged. But just one day later, she woke up gasping for air, and she was rushed to a different hospital. Her blood clots were diagnosed, and within hours, she was declared brain dead.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of the family’s decision regarding the baby?
But Smith's family says that doctors at Emory University Hospital have told them they cannot stop or remove the devices that are allowing Smith to continue breathing because of Georgia's abortion law. The law includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the woman. But in this case, the family says the doctors are claiming Smith's life is not at risk.
So the rights the state affords to fetuses takes precedent. Georgia's attorney general released a statement saying that Georgia's law does not require medical professionals to keep a pregnant person alive on life support if they are brain dead. As of now, the hospital plans to keep her on life support until August when doctors intend to deliver her baby via C-section.
Emory Healthcare said it couldn't comment on the individual case for privacy reasons and that it seeks input from clinical and legal experts to make decisions. Smith's mother told the local NBC affiliate she believes it ultimately should have been up to the family to make this decision.
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.
And she says doctors have told them the baby has fluid in the brain.
My grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, will chip out. We don't know. if he'll live once she has him.
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Chapter 5: How has severe weather impacted Kentucky recently?
The family has decided to name the baby Chance. The director of the maternal fetal medicine division at George Washington University told the Washington Post the odds of the baby being born healthy by the end of this are, quote, very, very small. We are in the middle of severe weather season. The U.S.
has seen over 850 tornadoes this year, much higher than the usual number for this time of year, which is around 600, according to the National Weather Service. The images coming out of Kentucky in particular are shocking. after a series of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes over the weekend, with entire neighborhoods flattened, homes destroyed, and communities in mourning.
Carrie Davis from London, Kentucky, showed Fox News the wreckage of her home.
There's a trailer behind us that's on top of my house, a whole trailer, and it blew out the cars, and my neighbors were terrified. He got two broken legs, and she had a big laceration on her face, but she lived her whole life, and this has never happened in this area.
With the frequency and severity of major storms on the rise, this has raised questions about how well-equipped federal agencies like FEMA and NOAA are to prepare for and respond to severe weather events. Both have recently been subject to deep cuts by DOGE.
Since returning to office, President Trump has threatened to disband FEMA entirely, and he fired the acting head after he said he disagreed with that plan. The agency's preparedness plans, along with billions of dollars in disaster assistance and grant funding, have been stalled.
The administration stopped approving new money for a federal program that has historically supported disaster-prone states like Florida, Oklahoma, California, and Missouri. The administration also halted federal programs to reduce wildfire risk in the western U.S. About a third of FEMA's permanent full-time workforce has been fired or accepted buyouts.
At the National Weather Service, which falls under NOAA, fewer weather balloons are being sent into the air. Seth Borenstein, a science writer with the AP, recently explained to PBS NewsHour how they work and why they're important.
Normally, the Weather Service puts out 100 balloon launches twice a day. So since this has happened, about 17 different stations are not launching either at all or just once a day. Four years ago, that was only nine stations.
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Chapter 6: What are the effects of federal cuts on emergency services?
All this as Atlantic hurricane season is just around the corner. It starts on June 1st, and forecasters are predicting it'll be quite active right from the start. Now to Oklahoma, where beginning next school year, high school U.S. history teachers will cover topics like the Revolutionary War, the Civil Rights Movement.
But the state's new academic standards will also require educators to have students, quote, identify discrepancies in the 2020 presidential election results or else risk losing their teaching certificate. That is, despite the fact that claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been credibly and repeatedly proven false. Beth Wallace is an education reporter with State Impact Oklahoma.
She told us what these new standards, which apply to K-12 public schools, require.
Chapter 7: How does staffing affect the National Weather Service's performance?
Things like looking at bellwether county trends, looking at, you know, quote-unquote batch dumps of ballots, the sudden halting of ballot counting.
Parents, educators, and members of the state legislature, including a number of Republicans, as well as the governor, have raised concerns. Oklahoma's state legislature is led by Republicans, and leaders introduced a resolution to reject these standards. But there wasn't enough GOP support to pass it. Family members and educators, meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit.
They argue the standards were not properly reviewed and that they quote represent a distorted view that favors a blatantly biased perspective. They're being represented in court by a former attorney general for Oklahoma who is a Republican.
Part of their concerns stems from how the standards were introduced to the State Board of Education earlier this year, which Wallace says happened just before their vote on academic criteria that had been under consideration for over a year.
Those board members actually only had hours to look at these new standards that had been put in at the last minute. Many of the new members didn't even know about these additions.
They were introduced at the direction of Ryan Walters, the state's school superintendent, a publicly elected official. He's been a strong ally of President Trump and was reportedly considered for the role of U.S. Secretary of Education.
He has a state committee to specifically implement Trump policies in Oklahoma schools. There's a video that came out a few months ago that he required schools to show students of him praying for President Trump. So this is just kind of the next thing in a long line of overtures to President Trump that Ryan Walters has made.
Some Republicans in the state have defended the standards. So has Walters, who has said he does not regret introducing them and that he believes they'll encourage critical thinking in classrooms. Wallace spoke to Tammy Patrick, the CEO for programs at the Election Center, which is an association for election administrators.
She said she's concerned these new standards in Oklahoma will breed misunderstanding about how elections function and erode public trust. Things like late night ballot counts, for example, are totally standard, not an indicator of a so-called discrepancy.
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