Adriana Smith

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. PRESSLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share the story of Adriana Smith.

Adriana Smith was a 30-year-old nurse from Georgia and the mother of a vibrant 5-year-old boy. She started to experience debilitating headaches, and she sought medical care. She was discharged and her pain was dismissed, as is so often the case for Black women in this country and certainly in our healthcare system.

The next morning, Adriana woke up gasping for air and was taken to Emory Hospital, where she was declared brain dead.

There are no words to provide healing for a pain this deep--a dedicated and loving mother, a compassionate nurse, gone at the age of 30.

In the days that followed, Adriana's family and son should have been able to make a solemn, independent decision about what happened next as they celebrated her life; as they mourned this devastating loss; as they pieced their lives back together; and as they began helping their 5-year-old cope with the grief and loss of his precious mother.

Yet, the State of Georgia denied Adriana her bodily autonomy and dignity in death. In the days and weeks that followed, her family found themselves in a desperate battle with Emory Hospital.

The hospital believed that the anti-abortion bill that Georgia enacted in 2022 following the gutting of Roe v. Wade tied the hospital's hands and mandated that Adriana's body, her brain-dead body, remain hooked to machines. Mr. Speaker, this was not because there was any chance of survival, she had already transitioned, but because Adriana was 9 weeks pregnant, about a month past a missed period. Adriana's body has been turned into an incubator; an incubator with no medical rationale, no ethical reason, and no compassion.

Mr. Speaker, from the days of enslavement, Black women's bodies have been subjected to medical abuse, assault, and degradation in this country. We are more likely to die in childbirth. We are routinely denied medical care. We are dehumanized. Like in the case of Adriana Smith, our bodies and our dignity are desecrated in death.

This is cruelty. It is the latest episode in a long history of the experimentation and exploitation of Black bodies. I grieve for Adriana's family, for the torture they are experiencing layered with the daily uncertainty that they are navigating as they try to do right by their daughter and lay her to rest peacefully.

Her parents are by her bedside. Her 5-year-old asked: When will Mommy wake up?

Adriana should be here today, her blood clots treated, her voice trusted, and her pain believed. She should be decorating a nursery for her little son with her family and celebrating her son's last day of kindergarten, but Adriana's body lies hooked to machines in a hospital bed as part of an unjust medical experiment for more than 3 months. No family should have to endure this.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source