Dystopian Novel and Hulu Series The Handmaid’s Tale Is Happening Right Now in Georgia
What’s happening to Adriana Smith isn’t fiction. But if it feels eerily familiar, it’s because it mirrors a haunting storyline from The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 3, Episode 9, titled “Heroic.”
In that episode, June (the main character) is forced to remain bedside to a brain-dead pregnant Handmaid — kept alive solely to deliver a viable fetus. The woman is hooked to machines, her body reduced to an incubator, stripped of dignity, personhood, and choice. June, traumatized and enraged, bears witness to this inhumane treatment, powerless to intervene.
Now, fast-forward to 2025 — not on a screen, but in Georgia.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother of four, was declared brain-dead in February after suffering a massive stroke from untreated blood clots. She was nine weeks pregnant. Despite being legally and medically dead, Adriana’s body has been kept on life support for over three months because of a detectable fetal heartbeat — not because it’s what she would’ve wanted, but because Georgia’s six-week abortion ban grants legal protections to embryos and fetuses.
Sound dystopian? That’s because it is.
Her family is living in anguish. Her mother, April Newkirk, describes the situation as “torture.” They’re forced to watch machines sustain a body no longer alive, unable to lay their daughter to rest, unable to move forward.
📉 Medical experts have raised concerns about the fetus’s prognosis, citing abnormalities and likely disabilities. But in this legal gray zone — where hospital policy, legal fear, and reproductive restrictions collide — Smith’s body is being used against her will.
🏛️ Georgia’s attorney general has said the law doesn’t require life support in these cases, but the hospital’s actions suggest otherwise. Providers, understandably, fear legal backlash in a post-Roe world where even perceived violations can lead to prosecution.
📣 As reproductive justice advocates have pointed out, this nightmare disproportionately affects Black women, who already face higher maternal mortality rates and systemic inequities in healthcare. Adriana’s story is not just personal. It’s political, racial, and deeply unjust.
🧠 Like the woman in The Handmaid’s Tale, Adriana is being treated as a vessel — not a person. The parallels are chilling, and the message is clear: we are no longer in the realm of speculative fiction. This is happening right now in the United States.
📖 Read the full article here:
The 19th - Case of a brain-dead pregnant woman kept on life support is 'gut-wrenching,' advocates say
📺 "Heroic." The Handmaid’s Tale, season 3, episode 9, written by Lynn Renee Maxcy, directed by Daina Reid, performances by Elisabeth Moss and Julie Dretzin, Hulu, 24 July 2019.
