The push to detect electrical activity in embryonic cells as early as possible was initially intended to reassure mothers that their pregancies were on track. Then forced birth activists weaponized it as a 'heartbeat.' (From 2019)
But if you’re thinking about this as something that looks roughly like a person with something that looks roughly like a chest, inside which something that looks roughly like a valentine is going pitter-pat , you’re picturing the wrong thing. As the ob-gyn Jen Gunterthree years ago, this is, more technically, “fetal pole cardiac activity.” It’s a cluster of pulsing cells. “In the mouse embryo, for example, there is a definite cardiac rhythm in the tiny, little, immature heart at 8.
Science doesn’t seem to be a strong point of many states’ anti-abortion bills. You might have read about anOhio is considering that would ban most birth control and require the surgical reimplantation of ectopic pregnancies, a dangerous-to-the-mother condition in which an embryo implants somewhere other than the uterus. That’s not something scientists know how to do.
To opponents, the six-week bans’ deployment of science—or at least scientific language—sounds like an attempt to challenge those rulings. “Using the wordplays upon people’s emotions … when in fact what it does is effectively ban abortions for many people, because many people don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks.”
Yet many state bills use a six-week clock and fetal cardiac activity as a basis for policymaking. “I do think there’s a deliberate conflation of terms going on in legislation in order to try to co-opt the science, or at least the scientific language,” Horvath says. “These bans are really just arbitrarily chosen points in time in a pregnancy that are strictly there because they want a complete ban on abortion care.
This kind of slippery language and shoddy science has consequences. Even if it wasn’t an attempt to put a veneer of scientific finality over a difficult ethical question, it’d still open up the possibility of serious health risks to pregnant women.
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