South Carolina’s legislature voted to outlaw abortions for babies who have a heartbeat. Planned Parenthood is challenging that law, and in particular, the abortion giant is challenging its application to babies at 6 to 8 weeks of gestation.
Part of Planned Parenthood’s argument is that babies at six weeks do not have a heartbeat. There are specific legal questions about the wording of the South Carolina law, but one of the least defensible arguments made by abortion defenders is that babies this early in development lack a heartbeat.
The first inconvenient fact for abortion defenders is that an ultrasound detects the heartbeat of the in-utero baby at about six weeks. On the ultrasound screen, you can see the tiny heart beating to pump blood throughout the tiny body. Also, ultrasound machines indicate the rate and magnitude of this motion by producing a sound.
The efforts to deny this is a heartbeat are tireless — and often inexplicable.
Stacey Abrams, the celebrity Democrat, tried to spread a bizarre conspiracy theory about the makers of these ultrasound machines.
“There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,” Abrams said while running for governor in 2022. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”
Abrams’s first claim is wrong: There is a heartbeat at six weeks, as we will discuss below. Second, taken literally, Abrams was positing that the manufacturers of ultrasound machines, such as General Electric, programmed them to indicate movement with sound because these corporations are part of an anti-abortion conspiracy to help men take control of a woman’s body.
That’s a falsehood combined with a second totally insane falsehood.
Nevertheless, Abrams had quasi-defenders in the news media. The Washington Post’s fact checker, instead of debunking the insane conspiracy theory, tried to defend part of what she said.
Kessler’s evidence that there is no fetal heartbeat at 6 weeks was an NPR article that is itself grounded in a glaring factual error.
“What the ultrasound machine detects in an embryo at six weeks of pregnancy is actually just electrical activity from cells that aren’t yet a heart,” according to the NPR article.
This is obviously false because ultrasound machines do not detect “electrical activity from cells.” They don’t detect electricity. Ultrasound machines shoot sound waves and measure reflections of those sound waves. The sound waves don’t bounce off of electrical activity — they bounce off of tissue. That is, ultrasounds show you where your baby is and can thus discern movement, such as the movement of the legs or the head.
At best, what NPR meant is that the ultrasound detects movement caused by electrical activity. That movement is the rhythmic beating of the part of the baby’s body that circulates its blood.
This isn’t just my opinion. Again and again, when doctors and experts write about the cardiac pulsing inside a 6-week fetus, they call it a “fetal heartbeat.”
The website VeryWell Health, which partners with the Cleveland Clinic, explains: “The fetal heart begins beating around five to six weeks’ gestation. Around that time, a fetal heartbeat may be detected with a transvaginal ultrasound.”
Here’s a 2023 article from the journal Tropical Medicine and Health about a pregnant woman with malaria: “An abdominal ultrasound incidentally revealed a fetus of 5 week gestational age with a heartbeat in the uterus.”
Likewise, here’s an article in the journal Fertility and Sterility, which is published by the very pro-choice American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
The article is titled “Predictive value of the presence of an embryonic heartbeat for live birth.”
The article explains: “The EHR [embryonic heart rate] was determined between 6 and 8 weeks of gestation by transvaginal sonography.”
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Later, it indicates that “in most studies, a slow EHR was defined as below 100 beats per minute (bpm) before 6.3 gestational weeks or below 120 bpm between 6.3 and 7.0 gestational weeks.”
That is, when abortion law isn’t the discussion, experts and doctors call it a heartbeat. When abortion law is the issue, the news media and some experts stop admitting it’s a heartbeat.
