Take a closer look.
For Adriana Archival ink on bristol 2026 This piece serves as a memorandum of the life of Adriana Smith. In February 2025, when she was nine weeks pregnant, Smith was declared brain dead following a medical emergency. Against her family’s wishes, Smith’s body was kept on life support as a means of gestating the fetus inside her, even as her body decayed around it. At approximately 24 weeks, Smith’s baby was removed from her artificially sustained corpse, and she was taken off life support four days later. As of March 2026, Chance Smith is still in the hospital and unable to breathe independently. Following the news of this case, I found myself struggling to manage my visceral disgust and profound grief. Adriana Smith’s story encapsulated so many things that disturb me to my core–the reduction of women to breeding machines, the politicization of the female body, the disproportional maternal mortality rates among Black women. While I would never presume to speak for Adriana Smith, I do not want her story, or the dignity that was denied to her, to ever be forgotten. Further reading: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/15265161.2025.2554796?needAccess=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Smith_pregnancy_case