Dead or alive

A mother describes as torture seeing her pregnant daughter, who suffered a stroke and has been declared brain dead, kept breathing through a ventilator so her 21-week-old unborn baby can be safely delivered on the 32nd week.

“I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there,” said April Newkirk of 30-year-old Adriana Smith, NBC News reports. 

Smith, who has been breathing through machines for more than 90 days, began experiencing intense headaches in early February, when she was nine weeks pregnant with her second child, according to NBC News. 

She went to a hospital in Georgia but was not tested and only given medication before being sent home. The next day, she suffered a stroke and was brought to Emory University Hospital, where she has been connected to a life support machine to breathe. 

Under Georgia’s abortion law, fetuses over six weeks old cannot be aborted, forcing Smith’s family to keep her on a ventilator so the baby can be saved. Assuming the baby survives, Smith’s may look like a case of a dead person coming back to life through her newborn. 

It’s no longer uncommon though to see those who were declared clinically dead resuscitated and come alive again. 

The United States’ Social Security Administration put dates of death on millions of beneficiaries in its records for being implausibly old, CNN reports. 

The Department of Government Efficiency, formerly headed by the richest man Elon Musk, announced on X in late March that about 10 million people over the age of 120 had been marked deceased, with another roughly two million to go, according to CNN. 

The agency also sent out emails on the dates of death posted on 3.5 million records, with instructions on whom to report erroneous death listings to.

For some people who have recently been declared dead but are actually alive, the SSA advises them to go to its offices to be “resurrected.” The agency has instructed staff to finish “death correction cases” the same day a beneficiary reports the error, according to CNN.