Woman declared legally dead is being kept alive due to state’s abortion laws

[Youstolemygoddamnhouse]

Anyone see this story?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/pregnant-georgia-woman-brain-dead-abortion-law

TLTR
US women is being kept alive on life support due to abortion laws. Woman was 9 weeks pregnant when she became brain dead. Family have no say in the matter and do not want this. The foetus if it survives may have life long health conditions and suffer from brain damage. Family are also having to pay for medical fees occurred and also for future birth fees.

I am being unreasonable to say WTF. Where is the outcry about this? This actually happened in an episode of The Handmaid’s tale.

YABU - this is the law, law needs to be upheld even after death
YANBU - WTF. Women are not safe even after death.

(in response to ThejoyofNC - this was supposed to have a quote!)
Your post was directly under this post:

The laws are less "medical abortions are no longer acceptable" and more "any medical intervention that could knowingly lead to the death of a fetus is illegal". They were deliberately written to be both broad and blunt.

If a medical intervention can or will cause loss of pregnancy, that is an abortion.

Thankfully, it does look like the law has been updated in USA to reflect ectopic pregnancies specifically as an exception. There are a few cases in red states (like Texas) where doctors have been afraid to undertake treatment in case they are fined (more likely that they disagree the legal exception).

I guess where it gets fuzzy now are other conditions that require treatment that might cause loss of pregnancy (i.e. an abortion) but to save the mother’s life. That is not protected explicitly in law. So, you are not 100% against abortion, by definition - as your responses have proven, you have your own personal exceptions.

Abortion doesn’t make pro-choicers happy, by the way. It just means that sometimes, there are some events where an abortion might be less traumatic than the alternative.

Nailed it.

That’s not what they’re doing though.

that child’s life cannot be saved. It will not, can not and is not forming properly in a dead woman’s body.

they aren’t battling to save any life. What they are doing is an unethical experiment to see what happens to a foetus in a body on life support.

new headline “doctors experiment on foetuses to see how maternal death affects development in utero”

it’s the kind of medical experiment Joseph Mengele would be doing if he had access to today’s medicine.

if it were successful, what’s the next step? Renting the bodies of brain dead women for surrogacy?

Utter bollocks.

OMFG. I didn't realise that. It just gets worse and worse.

@Neetra30This is what really pisses me off when someone says that they are 100% against abortion and it just tells me that they don’t know what they are talking about and sit on their high horse as if they are just better people than all of those irresponsible women who skip off down to the abortion clinic willy nilly.
I have never been in the position of needing to have an abortion but I know people who have and it might shock the people who are fully against it to know that some women abort much wanted pregnancies but in their ignorant world they can’t think of any reason this would happen.

Would they be allowed to treat a convicted criminal the same way? Deny them medical care, then keep them alive to harvest their organs?

Being declared brain dead means you are legally dead. In the U.K. we perform two sets of brain stem tests by senior clinicians and if a patient is found to not have these brain stem reflexes they are legally dead from the time the first test ended (the second is an extra safeguard). Sometimes when patients and their families give the gift of organ donation we have some time that we need to get to before that happens and keeping someone’s physiology normal during that time is really really difficult.

This story makes me shudder and it is deeply frightening. She was an autonomous human being, a woman with rights and dreams and wishes and now she has sadly died. Where is her dignity in this? Where is her right to be treated as a person who lived and now is dead? Her poor family, my heart goes out to them.

I am 100% pro-abortion and 100% supportive of a woman’s right to choose. This isn’t about abortion though, this is about treating a woman like a vessel for a child. The same as in the other horrific cases where this has happened and it is terrifying.

What’s horrific is if this results in a healthy child, if a dead body can carry a child to a healthy enough point, this is bad news for the rights of women and there will be people thinking they can use brain dead women as incubators. I could understand if she was heavily pregnant at the time but only 9 weeks…

You're allowed an opinion.

However that said, are you anti abortion for yourself only or other women? It's fine for you to be for yourself, but not at all ok for you to dictate what other women need or want to do.

I mean upfront? If the family makes clear that the states’s decision to impose medical care on a dead body should not mean the family members are forced to pay those medical costs. It’s just seems odd they are incurring a debt that has nothing to do with them.

This isn't even some old law though. This law was enacted in 2019 and only took effect three years ago.

What about women who have been brutally raped or gotten pregnant due to incest. What are your thoughts on those women who choose to have abortions?

So is it ok for women who didn't have sex for fun to be denied abortions? If it's ok to have abortions for the reasons above, then are you standing up for the foetus or punishing the woman?
(I know you were asking the pp about their views)

But this is not a medical intervention that will cause loss of life. It’s literally the opposite.

The Devil does not need advocates but no, there is no heading that would make the story ok for me.

Try telling that to some hospitals in the USA

Wow what a weird situation. It’s not termination if the mother dies ffs… they don’t know the risk this has had to the baby and what lifelong issues it may have as well as having no mother. So cruel.

Holy Jesus Fuck that makes it so much worse.

”It’s your fault I hit you!”

Does archaic not also mean old fashioned rather than just plain old 🤷🏻‍♀️

This. It’s baffling to me that the family would ever be landed a bill for this.

It does, but I felt that it was a point worth making that it's not just an old law that no one has got around to repealing.

The foetus is being incubated in a dead body. While a hospital can keep blood and air circulating in that body, the brain's inactive so is not performing any autonomic functions. The team will have to add hormones, etc, as they deem appropriate but it's a mistake to assume a corpse will continue to interact normally with a developing foetus.

Also, bodies kept on artificial life support do start to break down within a couple of months. I read a long explanation of this around the time Ireland was maintaining corpse mothers, but it was grisly so I didn't bother remembering it.

ETA: I'm not someone medical, but you can look this up.

^^ This
If you’re thinking of voting for Reform, then think again.

I think the whole topic is very complicated. I absolutely agree that pregnant women need a discussion around what they would want if something like this happened to them, so they could choose and go through their options, as not every pregnant woman will have a partner that is supportive or family to help raise the child and in terms of the child had a lifelong condition, would the child have quality of life?

I also think we need to see long term research on the children that this has happened too. My nana who is 78 was telling me something like this happened when she was 15, woman was ran over who was pregnant (not sure what stage) but she was in critical care or dying and they delivered the child. Not exactly the same but similar.

100% agree with what you’re saying about oxygen deprivation. For me I believe in quality of life over quantity. My cousin jumped off a bridge when he was in his early 20s and declared brain dead. He’s still alive now over 25 years but in a vegetative state. He has a team of carers 24/7. I honestly don’t even know how much this has cost but he’s just lay in his bed for 25 years no quality of life whatsoever. If that happened to me I would rather they just pull the machines off.