Transcript:

Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to 15 Minutes of Feminism, part of our on the issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. magazine platform. As you know, we’re a show that reports, rebels and we tell it just like it is. And on this show we count the minutes in our own feminist terms, and, as you know we dive right in.

This episode is the ringing of an alarm bell. In fact, it’s a 5-alarm fire that’s taking shape across the United States. But today we’re pointing the finger directly at the State of Georgia. It’s there that Adriana Smith, who passed away in February, declared brain-dead, the legal and medical standard in the United States for death.

Adriana passed away in February, a nurse and a mother, but because of Georgia’s draconian and horrific antiabortion law, the hospital that kept her tethered her to machines against her family’s will, because they say that the state’s abortion ban justifies it. According to the hospital, she is now an incubator, an incubator for the last 90 days, and it is expected if the body is kept in Georgia. If Adriana Smith’s body is kept in Georgia for at least another three months she will be an incubator.

Now this is not science fiction, though I wish that it were. This is not the science fiction town of Gilead made famous by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale. This is not the early science fiction of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

No, this is the American drama. We could call this the story of Dobbs, the story of the 2022 Supreme Court decision wherein Justice Alito and the majority of the United States Supreme Court stripped away a 50-year precedent, nearly 50-year precedent that had provided the constitutional right, recognized the fundamental constitutional right for women to be able to receive the reproductive healthcare that they need at any stage of the life cycle, and that is, including at death. Instead what the Supreme Court did was to overturn Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and send the question of the dignity involving reproductive health care to the individual states.

Now the state that triggered this, and it’s important to talk about, is the State of Mississippi, the State of Mississippi, known for its Mississippi appendectomy, which was no appendectomy at all, but the state’s clever way of describing coercive sterilization of Black women and girls, Black girls as young as 11 and 12 years old receiving the knife of the State of Mississippi when it came to reproductive health matters.

That’s that same State of Mississippi where Fannie Lou Hamer famously described what it was like for her, and other Black women who wanted to change those systems, to elect people who would fairly represent them to elect officials who would recognize the dignity, the value of women in that state instead. What the State of Mississippi required of women like Fannie Lou Hamer is that if they wanted to vote, they had to guess how many jelly beans in a jar. Guess how many bubbles on a bar of soap. Recite the State’s constitution. And here I’m not talking about the 1910s, the 1920s, 1930s. I’m talking about right up until the time of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This is what Fannie Lou Hamer famously told America and the world in 1964. At the Democratic National Convention she told the story about how she and a group of black women attempted to vote in the State of Mississippi, inspired by young civil rights activists who came down to Mississippi, and who were so courageous and sadly, who were murdered. And it was with that that a group of women said that those young people, Andy Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney that their lives could not go in vain, and that these women needed to stand up and vote, and that is exactly what they attempted to do.

But in the State of Mississippi, known for its Mississippi appendectomy, known for its coercive sterilization of Black women, Fannie Lou Hamer, in fact, had been coercively sterilized in the State of Mississippi. This made it all the more important for her to stand up for herself and for women and girls in that State, and to try to vote, and on the day in which she and a group of Black women attempted that they were arrested.

They were taken off of the bus that they had been traveling in. They were put in a jail where there were male prisoners, and then the guards came for them and took them one by one out of their cells, and put them into cells where there were men. And then the guards turned over their batons and their flashlights and told these men to beat these women.

Fannie Lou Hamer told us about that in 1964 at the Democratic National Convention, and she said all of this just because we, as women, refuse to be second class citizens. All of this just because we demand the right to be fully included in this democracy. All of this because we refuse to be second-class citizens. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 then came into being within about a year of Fannie Lou Hamer’s important, important speech before the Democratic National Convention.

But it is that state, the State of Mississippi, that has long not recognized women’s equality, a state that banned women, not only from voting, from serving on juries, from being able to have credit cards in their own name, from being able to have checking accounts in their own names known for its Mississippi appendectomy. It’s that state that the Supreme Court decided to take up its antiabortion bill, a bill that provided no safe haven for matters of incest or rape. And it was out of that that Mississippi said, not only hold up our law, Supreme Court. But, by the way, get rid of abortion rights all across the United States, and that’s what the Supreme Court did. The Supreme Court said, “well, we’ll just turn these matters back over to the State, Mississippi, no matter what your history had been, and the fact that there had only been one abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. No matter your very high rates of maternal mortality, we’ll look past that, Mississippi, we’ll look past your high rates of maternal morbidity. We’ll look past that. We’ll look past the various states lining up for their abortion bans to go into place, all of these states with very high rates of maternal mortality.”

The Supreme Court failed to even recognize its own guidance from only a few years before. in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, where the Supreme Court acknowledged in 2016, that in the United States a woman is 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. And you heard me right. Let me repeat that for you. The Supreme Court ignored what it had already written just a few years before acknowledging the deadliness of what it means in the United States to carry a pregnancy to term, that a woman is 14 times more likely to die in the United States carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. But the court also ignored something very important, and that comes alive in the case of Adriana Smith, which is that we can’t ignore as much as folks are trying to ignore America’s history of poverty imposed on some communities, racism imposed on some communities. We have to speak truth to power, and that is what we do on the Ms. Studios and Ms. magazine platform.

Black women are three and a half times more likely to die carrying pregnancies to term in the United States than their white counterparts. And that’s just the national figure. Once we actually dive down in specific counties and states, a Black woman might be 10 times more likely to die during pregnancy, 15 times more likely to die during pregnancy, than her white counterpart. But let’s be clear. This nation is no panacea for white women during pregnancy. We saw that with a group of white women in Texas, Kate Cox, Amanda Zurowski and others. These anti-abortion bans have been so draconian and so harsh that women have been bleeding out in parking lots in front of hospitals or sent back home after several times of trying to keep trying to attend to and in need of medical care.

In Adriana’s case, race doesn’t escape us, either. She passed away after being denied a CT scan. She’s an African American woman who passed away in February. Here’s what her mother April Newkirk has to say. She said they gave her some medication when she first went to see doctors, but they didn’t do any tests. No CT scan. And if they had done that, according to her mother, if they had kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented.

This is a story that is experienced far too often, far too often in the United States for Black women, and, as I’ve said, it’s no panacea for white women either. The United States leads all of the industrialized world in maternal mortality. We rank somewhere around 55th in the world, but for Black women, it’s worse than every other group in the United States.

Adriana Smith’s mother has said that it’s been like torture for her. She says it’s torture for me. She’s not there, meaning her daughter, and it’s true. Brain death in the United States is a standard that’s been utilized for more than the last half century as a matter of determining death. It’s the way in which we determine death for organ transplant policy, and so much, and what her mother has revealed is something that is consistent with a case that was out of Texas, involving Marlise Muñoz, which is that the fetus that is developing in Adriana’s dead body is hydrocephalic, and what that means is that it has water on the brain. Now, we don’t know how much fluid is on the brain, but what we do know about hydrocephalic cases is that in many cases death results immediately after birth. Shortly after birth, or sometimes there is stillbirth.

It means there may be dramatic fetal anomalies in the gestational process.

In Marlise’s case a judge after 62 days allowed for Marlisa’s husband, Erick, and her family members, her parents, to receive her and prepare for dignity in her death and burial or cremation.

That was after 62 days of Marlise being tethered, two machines tethered to a shaking bed in order to prevent bed sores as much as possible. Marlise’s father said that her body had gone from being supple to being hard, like a mannequin.

What bioethicists commented on at the time is that that transformation of the body, becoming hard was actually a sign of decaying, a sign of the organs shutting down. And, in fact, what was true in Marlise’s case and true here is that these women are dead. The ventilation taking place, the intubations, the pumping of fluids into the body and then the straining of waste away is to keep the organs functioning. And by keeping the organs functioning, what it is allowing, as the body decays, is then some semblance of gestation in the State of Georgia. What hospital officials are expecting is to keep Adriana’s body tethered to machines for another 90 days or so, another three  months. Now, in the space of that that raises significant legal and constitutional questions.

It’s well understood in American law that there is no such thing where an individual or even a state, can claim ownership of somebody’s body for another person’s purpose. This has already been litigated in the United States in a famous case called McFall v. Shimp, there was a cousin who was dying and needed a bone marrow transplant, and he had a cousin who could perhaps provide that.

But in that case, as the cousin petitioned to get this bone marrow support from his cousin, a court said, that that’s not who we are in the United States, for better or for worse, that an individual cannot claim some property ownership over another, and for those of you who are thinking right now that this sounds like American slavery, well, you wouldn’t be far from that, because one can’t help but see a throughline in this case.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery now, not just that kind of slavery that most Americans think about where it’s a bucolic field where people seem to be happy, picking cotton or sugar cane, or doing whatever others are forcing them to do.

What many of our listeners know and understand is that there is another form of slavery that was robustly and rigorously enforced, and it was an involuntary, a forced, reproductive servitude. And this is what lawmakers who drafted the 13th Amendment were writing about were giving speeches about what they knew is that throughout the American South in states where slavery was being practiced. There was something known as the breeding wench. Now, who was the breeding wench? According to advertisements, girls as young as 10 years old, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, being sold as breeding wenches. There are advertisements that people were placing in newspapers, a gang of breeding wenches for sale.

What lawmakers who ratified the 13th Amendment knew is that it was not going to be enough to simply ban slavery in the amendment, that they needed to ban involuntary servitude as well, because this was the kind of invisible, involuntary servitude that was taking place. And, in fact, let me just even check myself, because it’s invisible to us today. But it was very much seen at the time. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to John Wayles Eppes, and you can find this on the Monticello website, where Thomas Jefferson wrote that on his plantation he preferred to stock it with women and girls, because, according to him, they turn a profit every year or two, and turned out to be far more profitable than men.

So we have to ask ourselves in light of the 13th Amendment which exists, which is the first amendment that is part of our reconstructed Constitution. It is the first of the Reconstruction Amendments. Then, we have to ask ourselves, in what universe does a hospital in Georgia or State lawmakers in Georgia believe that they can take ownership of Adriana Smith’s body, and that they can force upon that body an involuntary reproductive servitude that serves as a desecration of her body that serves as a point that is contrary to health and science. And so let me just spend a moment on the following.

In 1947, lawmakers from the United States, the Justice Jackson from the Supreme Court, took a leave in order to prosecute Nazi doctors for the horrific crimes that were carried out in Nazi Germany. Now, it’s worth noting that the chief defense of those doctors, what they started out with is, how dare you come from the United States to point a finger at us when we were carrying out some practices that you allowed in the United States, including your eugenics practices. Now that aside, and we’ll come back for another episode on that. But coming out of those Nuremberg trials was a code of ethics, a code of bioethics, a code of bioethics that first starts with the principle of autonomy, and secondly, with informed consent that medical providers should not be involved in anything where the individuals involved have not given informed consent, and in this case, because Adriana is brain dead, it would be her mother, and her mother has not given consent to this.

The second thing is that there must be a respect for autonomy. There’s been absolutely no respect for the autonomy of the now deceased Adriana Smith, or her mother. And then, according to these principles is in Latin “primum, non nocere,” and for those of you who understand Latin, you know that that means “first, do no harm.” Now, these are principles that were not just contained in Germany. These were principles that we brought back from the United States. These came from Americans who went to Germany to handle the Nuremberg trial, and coming out of it were these important principles, forged through stone and iron, right of law, health, and science: do no harm, get informed, consent, respect, autonomy and that there be no malfeasance.

In this case, we can say that the alarm bell is ringing across all of those issues, and let there be one more that we add to that, and that is the disparate treatment at end of life, involving a person who happens to be pregnant.

In no other way would a man showing up and then becoming brain dead at a Georgia hospital, in no way could the state then say, or the hospital we’ve decided to cleave him open. We’ve decided to ignore his last wishes. We’ve decided to ignore his wife or his parents. We’re just doing things on our own.

We know that that would not be the case, and in this instance it is important to understand that even though Georgia might have an abortion ban, its abortion ban is not broad enough to cover the 13th Amendment. Its abortion ban is not broad enough to cover the state. Taking ownership of a deceased person’s body. The abortion ban is not broad enough to cover a hospital from civil litigation. When the hospital decides to ignore what are fundamental legal principles and fundamental principles in ethics.

Now, as I begin to wrap up this emergency episode, I want to flashpoint back to Marlise Muñoz’s case, the case where the State had forced her to incubate a fetus that was developing with abnormalities where its lower extremities were not developing, where hospital officials put her on a shaking bed that forced her eyelids to flap open and shut. Where, then, hospital officials then required that her eyelids be taped down where there was cleaving into her body, and so much more before finally, finally, her family members were able to lay her to rest.

This is only part of the beginning in the United States, unless this is stopped. Our hope is that April Newkirk is able to move her daughter out of the State of Georgia, and finally get peace for herself and for her family members.

Guests and listeners, that’s it for today’s episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. magazine. I want to thank each of you for tuning in for the full story and engaging with us. We hope you’ll join us again for our next episode where you know we’ll be reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. 

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This has been rehearsed. Michele Goodwin reporting, rebelling and telling it just like it is. On the Issues with Michele Goodwin is a Ms. magazine production. Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar are our executive producers. Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug and also Allison Whelan. Our social media content producer is Sophia Panigrahi. The creative vision behind our work includes art and design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Holland and music by Chris J. Lee.