Reproductive Violence, Adoption Ideology, and the Case of Adriana Smith

The Violent Ideology Behind the Birth That Should Never Have Happened.

If your first instinct is to defend the system instead of mourn Adriana Smith, you’ve already proven the point: this was never about her. It was about what could be taken from her. What could be made from her. And who gets to call that a miracle.

A brain-dead Black woman was kept on life support for months — not to heal her, not to mourn her — but to use her. To grow a child inside her corpse. You can dress it up in white coats and “medical marvel” headlines all you want. But this wasn’t a miracle. This was reproductive extraction. This was necropolitics — where the state decides who dies, and who gets harvested in their death.

And let’s be brutally honest: If this baby ends up adopted, we already know the spin.
“A gift.” “A blessing.” “A second chance.”

But there will be no mention of the mother — rendered voiceless even in death. No reckoning with the grotesque ethics of gestating a child inside a dead woman. Just another polished adoption narrative, sanitised for public consumption, with its bloody roots buried deep.

What Adoption Always Demands

Adoption, when wielded as ideology, does exactly this:
It repackages loss as love.
It demands silence from the mother, and gratitude from the child.
And when those of us who were adopted speak to the cost of that erasure? The world covers its ears.

Because to really confront this story would mean confronting the entire architecture of reproductive colonisation — a system that tells poor, Black, Indigenous, brown, or unwed mothers: Your child belongs somewhere better. Somewhere whiter. Somewhere wealthier.
And that belief is so deeply embedded that we will even preserve a womb after death to ensure the transfer can happen.

You Think This Is New? It’s Not.

What happened to Adriana Smith is not unprecedented. It’s just more visible now, more technologized. This is not about science fiction catching up to possibility — it’s about violence catching up to legitimacy.

This is the logic of Tuam. This is Georgia Tann in Tennessee. This is Korea, Guatemala, Romania, and Australia. This is white couples flying overseas to buy infants under the word “surrogacy,” while local mothers are stripped of their babies under sealed files and trauma-informed terms like “adoption plan.”

From intercountry to interracial adoption, the throughline remains:
Mothers made invisible.
Babies turned into vessels of someone else’s dream.
Grief erased for palatability.
Truth replaced with a saviour narrative.

Let’s Name It: This Is Reproductive Capitalism

Adriana Smith was not a vessel. She was a human being. A Black woman. And she deserved to be mourned, not mined.

She was kept “alive” not to honor her life, but to extract something useful from her death. That is not care. That is not dignity. That is biomedical colonialism in real time.

Would this happen to a white woman from wealth, with legal protection, political power, and family advocacy? Would her corpse be sustained to produce a child? Or is it only the Adrianas of the world — Black, poor, presumed voiceless — for whom “miracle” means what can be extracted from your body, long after your life has ended?

But What About the Baby?

This is the question I keep hearing. And here is my answer:

This child was brought into the world through violence.
Through erasure.
Through a system that believes the ends justify the means as long as someone gets a baby.

Whether or not this child is formally adopted doesn’t even matter — because the ideology already is.

The ideology that says a mother’s life, autonomy, and memory are expendable if her womb is still useful.

The ideology that has always defined some mothers as disposable, and some children as blank slates.

The ideology that says, “We didn’t save a life — we extracted one from a corpse and called it holy.”

And What Will That Child One Day Ask?

They will ask the question every adoptee, every donor-conceived, every womb-separated person eventually asks:

What happened to my mother?
And if all you have to offer is a “miracle” story…
If all you can say is “be grateful”…
Then you are robbing them a second time — first of their mother, then of the truth.

Because adoption doesn’t begin when a baby is placed in someone’s arms.
It begins when a mother is deemed unworthy of holding her own.

No, I Don’t Feel Hope. I Feel Sick.

I read this story not with inspiration, but with nausea.
Because I, too, was taken — not because I was unloved or unwanted, but because I was available.
Because society decided someone else could do a better job.
Because someone else’s pain-free narrative mattered more than my origin story.

I am the product of someone else’s happy ending. And I carry the cost.

Stop calling this love. It’s violence.
It’s reproductive colonisation.
It’s the state, the hospital, the church, the adoptive gaze — deciding who gets to live, who gets erased, and who gets harvested.

If you’re applauding this story — ask yourself:
Would you feel the same if it were your sister?
Your daughter?
Yourself?

And when that child asks the question — What happened to my mother? —
You better be ready to answer.

#AdopteeVoices

#AdrianaSmithDeservedBetter
#ReproductiveViolence
#ReproductiveRights
#StopSanitizingExtraction
#NotYourMiracle
#FamilySeparationIsNotLove
#AdoptionIsNotRedemption
#ModernDayColonialism