Brain Death, Fetal Personhood, and the Moral Community
In season three of The Handmaid’s Tale, Natalie, slave-named Ofmatthew, is kept alive after being shot because she is pregnant. Her fetus becomes the physician’s patient, while Natalie becomes the biological infrastructure used to sustain that patient. The Georgia case involving Adriana Smith presents a disturbing real-world parallel, not because Georgia is identical to Gilead, but because fetal status becomes legally and medically powerful enough to displace the woman as the central patient.
This post is also written in recognition of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, ended federal constitutional protections for abortion, and returned abortion regulation to the states. The Smith case forces a deeper ethical question: once fetal personhood enters law, what prevents the pregnant woman’s body, even after brain death, from becoming a site of state interest?