Hearts Matter in Texas

Hearts Matter in Texas!

In the matter of a new Texas law banning abortions six weeks after gestation, when a foetal heartbeat can usually be detected by vaginal ultrasound, suppose the headlines had been different? Instead of words like “most restrictive in nation” (The Wall Street Journal) and “Supreme Court refuses to block Texas law” (The Washington Post), along with four stories splashed across the front page of The New York Times that seemed to be written from the perspective of pro-choice writers, what if the headlines had instead reflected another point of view that took the side of babies and the women who carry them?

Those headlines and stories might have read: “Supreme Court decides to protect babies, recognizing Thomas Jefferson’s writing about endowed life coming from God.” Or, if that’s too long for headline writers, how about “Supreme Court takes side of the unborn”? Might that have changed the perception about abortion by people who are on the fence, or conflicted? Information, including sonograms for abortion-minded pregnant women, has been shown to change minds. So has compassionate counselling and adoption services at pregnancy help centres.

Much has changed since 1973 when a court majority found in Roe vs. Wade that a “penumbra” was hidden in the Constitution, which translated into a “right to privacy” so that a woman could legally terminate her pregnancy without interference from anyone, including the father. Since that ruling, the “right” to an abortion has been extended to include second-trimester abortions and to cover babies born alive after an attempted abortion.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.), a paediatrician, has suggested that a baby who survives an abortion should be “kept comfortable” and “resuscitated” and then “a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” Does this not entail infanticide?

The definition of “penumbra” is revealing: “the partial or imperfect shadow outside the complete shadow of an opaque body.” If that sounds unclear when applied to the Constitution, that’s because it is. Then-Justice Harry Blackmun, who used the word, clearly was not a textualist in the way Antonin Scalia was. It appears he read his own bias into the Constitution when he could find no justification for abortion elsewhere.

Judges reading into the Constitution their own biases, even prejudices, has long been a problem. It is a power the Founders never intended the courts and especially the Supreme Court to have.

The Texas law will still be challenged in other ways, as will a Mississippi law the Supreme Court has decided to hear this fall. That law, if passed, would ban most abortions after 15 weeks.

National Right to Life, which tracks figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, estimates there have been more than 62 million abortions since 1973, and the number of abortions each year has been steadily declining.

Many women have said they regretted their decision to have an abortion, many uphold that difficult decision. It seems we long ago shifted from doing what might be best for others to doing what was best for self, perhaps a reflection of the spirit of the modern age.

Abortion and refusing to take personal responsibility for one’s actions have contributed to a general coarseness and disrespect for life at all stages as witnessed by the shooting sprees regularly occurring in Chicago and other major cities. The Texas and Mississippi laws seek to reverse, or at least slow down the process of squandering human life.

The question remains: Is abortion the cause of our increasingly decadent culture, or a reflection of it?

The FACTS regarding heartbeat activity in a foetus

Many if not all pro-choice advocates claim that the human heart is not fully formed at six weeks’ development, and only electronic pulses known as “cardiac activity” are present.

While the leading authorities agree that the embryonic heart begins as a tube and eventually develops the four-chambered heart during gestational week seven, scientific authorities refer to the developing organ as a heart and the pulses as a “heartbeat.”

The Mayo Clinic notes that foetal “growth is rapid” in the sixth week of pregnancy, “just four weeks after conception.”

“The heart and other organs also are starting to form and the heart begins to beat,” the Mayo Clinic states.

During week five, “Your baby’s heart and a primitive circulatory system will form in the middle layer of cells — the mesoderm. This layer of cells will also serve as the foundation for your baby’s bones, ligaments, kidneys and much of the reproductive system.”

Although the Mayo Clinic is an exceptional clinic, it is no exception when it comes to affirming the reality of a foetal heartbeat at six weeks’ gestation.

“At about 6 weeks, your baby’s heart beat [sic] can usually be detected,” according to The Cleveland Clinic. While the ground-breaking medical facility put “heart” inside quotation marks when discussing the organ’s development at four weeks’ gestation — noting, “The tiny ‘heart’ tube will beat 65 times a minute by the end of the fourth week” — it did no such thing when writing of foetal heart development at six weeks, nor again at the beginning of month four, when it notes, “Your baby’s heartbeat may now be audible through an instrument called a doppler.”

Although not an authority on science, NPR reported - “Usually, heartbeat can be detected by vaginal ultrasound somewhere between 6 ½ – 7 weeks. The heartbeat may have started around six weeks, although some sources place it even earlier, at around 3 – 4 weeks after conception.”

Nor is this language confined merely to popular online websites designed for mass consumption. Medical textbooks and journals also state that a foetal or embryonic heartbeat begins at approximately the 21^st day of development:

“The human heart is the first functional organ to develop. It begins beating and pumping blood around day 21 or 22, a mere three weeks after fertilization. … It originates about day 18 or 19 from the mesoderm and begins beating and pumping blood about day 21 or 22,” according to Anatomy and Physiology by Lindsay M. Biga, a textbook used at Oregon State University (chapter 19.5).

“The heart begins to beat on day 21 or 22. … The embryonic heartbeat can be detected … during the fourth week, approximately 6 weeks after the last normal menstrual period,” according to Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects by Keith L. Moore, T. V. N. Persaud, and Mark G. Torchia (p. 45).

“The human heart is one of the first organs to form and function during embryogenesis. By the end of gestational week 3… the foetal heart becomes vital for oxygen and nutrient distribution. The initiation of the first heart beat via the primitive heart tube begins at gestational day 22, followed by active foetal blood circulation by the end of week 4,” according to a review article in the peer-reviewed journal Foetal Diagnosis and Therapy written by Cheryl Mei Jun Tan and Adam James Lewandowski.

During the fourth week of development (or the sixth week after the previous menstrual cycle), the “heart is beating,” according to the most recent edition of the textbook The Human Body in Health and Illness by Barbara Herlihy (p. 522).

The Verdict:

Former abortionist Carol Everett once described how abortion providers use semantic issues of science to promote abortion to young children. “You have to become the experts in their lives, and you have to separate them from their parents and their values,” she said.

The embryonic heart begins to form in an unborn child, creating activity that scientific authorities refer to as a “heartbeat.” It is hardly unscientific for pro-life advocates to follow their example.