In February 2025, 31-year-old nurse Adriana Smith headed for the Northside Hospital in Atlanta because she could no longer bear headaches.
She was given medications in the hospital and released her. But the next morning, Adriana found a friend fighting for his life and called the ambulance.
In another hospital – Emory University – Adriane diagnosed blood clots in the brain and a few hours later they stated that she was affected by brain death.
However, the body was not disconnected from the devices after more than 100 days – 17 June 2025. And 13 June 2025 brought a boy named Chance.
Given that the child had less than 900 grams and the family with such a medical procedure disagreed, the case has caused a stormy discussion in the US about strict abortion restrictions in some US states.
At the same time, the case opens the question of how far humanity can go to “playing” to God. Especially in a situation where a large part of the planet refuses to have children and, and numerous regions of the world, they die of hunger.
Out of the headache of a medical-ethic case
Adriana refused to disconnect the instruments because they did not allow the law. It prohibits abortion when the fetus is detected by heart activity. This is usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.
The law was passed in 2019, but it came into force only in 2022 after the annulment of the ROE decision against Wade (the Supreme Court acknowledged the right to abortion in 1973, but canceled it in 2022), which guaranteed the national right to abortion in the first trimester.
Currently, 12 US states apply a complete ban on abortion and four more, including Georgia (Atlanta, is forbidden after about six weeks of pregnancy.
Therefore, Adriana’s body kept the health professionals “alive” until it began to be subject to decomposition processes.
The case has triggered a wave of criticism against strict abortion laws in the US, which have been one of the main political topics in the country in recent years. Moreover, the former nurse was dark skin, and critics claim that African -Americans have more complicated health care access and faced racism.
Legal abortions were declining
It is the quality of health care or the availability of contraception that contributed to the number of abortions to decline. In Germany, for example, their number of over 134,000 in 2000 was reduced to less than 95,000 in 2021.
In the former socialist countries, the loss was even more pronounced. In Slovakia, their number decreased from 51,000 in 1988 to less than 5500 in 2020. In the same period, the number of abortions fell from nearly 110,000 to less than 17,000, in Hungary also from approximately 110,000 to 24,000, in Romania from nearly a million to less than 30,000.
On the other hand, for example, in France, artificial interruptions of pregnancy have been added in the same period. In 1990, approximately 201,000 abortions were carried out there, in 2023 the statistics recorded about 228,000 cases.
Hit a liberal and conservative approach
In recent years, the trend has also turned in Germany or Slovakia – abortions have increased slightly.
This is still the case that even liberals of abortion do not defend. However, they point out that their women are also undergoing in countries where they are prohibited and exposed to a high risk (according to the WHO, for example, in 2012, approximately 7 million women ended up in developing countries in the hospital with complications).
Conservatives, in turn, perceive abortion as killing a person and therefore absolutely reject them.
But whatever the country applies to any of these two approaches, the numbers show that in previous years women reached more often after artificial pregnancy.
According to the WHO, approximately 73 million abortions are performed annually. In the United States themselves, their number, according to one of the statistics from approximately 862,000 in 2017 to almost 950,000 in 2025
Who will decide on life and death?
However, the case of Adriana Smith also attracted attention in addition to abortion issues to the question of respecting the patient’s decision and the right to dignified death.
The US hospitals usually follow so -called “preliminary instructions”. These are legal documents in which individuals in advance determine the instructions for their healthcare if they are unable to decide for themselves.
If an individual does not have such a document, treatment decisions usually go to the closest relatives, such as the spouse, adult children or parents.
But Adriana Smith decided “authorities”. Since it was legally declared dead, it would not be taken into account by “preliminary instructions”, as was not taken into account by the wishes of her family.
This creates a paradox when, on the one hand, some states forbid modern medicine in abortions – because “it is against God”, but at the same time the same modern medicine is used to maintain people alive people in cases where it is not only against the “will of God” but also against the patient’s will.
Almost no vs five
A special touch gives the whole controversy a great contradiction between how many children are born in a richer part of the world and how many poor regions.
Virtually the entire northern part of the globe – from the US to European states to Japan and China – has been affected by the demographic crisis. People are often willing to bring a maximum of one child into an increasingly uncertain world.
In the countries of the global south, especially in Sub -Saharan Africa, the opposite phenomenon persists. In some African countries, women continue to give birth on average more than five children. And since these are states with chronic resources, they have high child mortality. Moreover, under the pressure of the ecological crisis, even a famine is returned to many region.
On the one hand, modern medicine and laws protect life in the uterus, but millions of living children are left to sleep from disease or hunger.
