The baby boy delivered from a Georgia woman who was declared brain dead earlier this year is still fighting for his life, nearly six months after his birth.
Analysts say the little child’s situation is a grave reminder of the human toll at the center of America’s post-Roe legal landscape.
Chance Smith, born on June 13 at just 1 lb. 13 oz., remains hospitalized with serious health complications, his grandmother says. His mother, Adriana Smith, a 26-year-old nurse from Atlanta, was declared brain dead in February after suffering multiple blood clots in her brain. She was only eight weeks pregnant.
Under Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, doctors told the family they were legally obligated to keep Smith on life support until the fetus reached viability. Her mother, April Newkirk, has called the months that followed “torture.”
“I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there,” she told Atlanta’s 11Alive earlier this year.
Now, Newkirk is preparing for the next agonizing chapter: a hospital transfer for Chance as doctors try to manage his underdeveloped lungs and ongoing breathing struggles.
“Chance is 11 pounds, still in the NICU and will not be coming home soon,” she wrote in a Nov. 24 update on GoFundMe. “He’s going to be moved to a different hospital for more help with his health… Continue to pray because God has the final say.”
Chance’s fragile condition underscores the central legal and ethical dilemmas that made his case national news. Georgia’s law, enacted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, with exceptions only for medical emergencies that endanger the pregnant woman’s life or bodily functions.
But Smith, declared brain dead, was no longer considered medically at risk, a classification that left her family powerless as machines kept her body functioning solely to sustain the fetus.
Medical ethicists say the scenario exposes a profound gray area in state abortion laws that were written without clear guidance for cases involving brain death, maternal incapacity, or catastrophic medical trauma.
Chance’s survival — and ongoing struggle — is the human consequence of that ambiguity.
Newkirk continues to visit him daily, posting photos that show a growing but medically fragile infant entangled in tubes and wires. She says she’s grateful for support but exhausted by grief, bureaucracy, and uncertainty.
“It’s holiday season and I’m very down,” she wrote simply.
As the national debate over reproductive rights rages on, Chance’s story sits at its painful intersection: a family navigating tragedy, a child fighting for breath, and a legal system still reckoning with the real-world impact of its most consequential ruling in half a century.
