Brain-dead after suffering a fatal stroke and in the early weeks of her pregnancy, the doctors at Emory University Hospital finally turned off the machines after the emergency C-section delivery of her son, Chance, who weighed less than two pounds.
Adriana Smith was kept on life support without the consent or input of her family. Four months after her death, she was finally laid to rest this past Friday after a funeral service at Fairfield Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia.
Georgia’s fetal-personhood law, formally known as the “Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act,” defines a fetus as a “natural person” with legal rights, effectively banning most abortions after cardiac activity is detectable, which is usually around six weeks. Due to this law, Smith’s body was kept on life support for more than four months. However, the law conflicts with fetal rights and a woman’s bodily autonomy and privacy.
“In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research,” Harriet A. Washington wrote in “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” She concluded, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”
African Americans as research subjects has a long and horrid history. “One of the most visible ways racism was made manifest was the multiple instances of physicians carrying out unethical experiments on African Americans,” Joel D. Howell said in an article detailing African Americans’ distrust of medicine.
Smith’s tragic story reads like another experiment, another instance of the devaluation and exploitation of an African American life. “American university research centers have historically been located in inner-city areas, and accordingly, a disproportionate number of these abuses have involved experiments with African Americans,” Washington pointed out.
Going to the doctor for medical checkups is one of my least favorite things to do. I cannot tell you when my aversion to doctors’ offices and distrust of people in lab coats began.
Maybe it was after I learned of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study after watching the 1997 made-for-television film “Ms. Evers’ Boys.” The men were deceived, made to believe they were being cured, but were deliberately misled about the nature of their illness and the purpose of the study. Instead, they were only to be observed for the sake of scientific ambition.
Then, President Bill Clinton issued an apology to the eight survivors on May 16th of the same year. He said in part:
“So today America does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent. We remember them and their family members. Men who were poor and African American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed.”
The men shared this apology with Macon County, Tuskegee, and “the doctors who have been wrongly associated with the events there.”
It should be understood, then, why so few African Americans participate in medical research or sign up to be organ donors. Stories like this one, along with Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken from a biopsy of her cervical tumor during her cancer treatment and harvested without her family’s knowledge or consent by Dr. George Gey, have sown distrust in medical institutions.
These cells were the first human cells to be successfully cultured and became known as HeLa cells. In response to public outcry against the HeLa cell line being used extensively in medical research and commercialized for profit for decades, The Johns Hopkins Hospital dedicated the Johns Hopkins Henrietta Lacks Building on October 28, 2024.
There is also a webpage dedicated to Lacks, which includes this statement:
“Having reviewed our interactions with Henrietta Lacks and with the Lacks family over more than 50 years, we found that Johns Hopkins could have – and should have – done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests. Though the collection and use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells in research was an acceptable and legal practice in the 1950s, the laws protecting research subjects have evolved. We at Johns Hopkins have been supportive of legal changes since 1951 that protect research subjects, and we are compliant with these requirements, including those related to informed consent.”
But Henrietta Lacks didn’t sign a consent form to be treated as a research subject. Adriana Smith didn’t either.
Lacks had cancer, and Smith complained of severe headaches before doctors at Atlanta’s Northside Hospital sent her home. But in the end, the women weren’t treated as patients.
As a result, they join a history of ethically flawed medical experimentation and medical racism that includes Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha, three enslaved women who underwent unethical experiments for the research interests of J. Marion Sims. Sims is called the “father of gynecology.”
With this kind of history, I’ll eat three apples a day if it will keep the doctors away from me.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
