Micaiah Bilger May 16, 2019
The “party of science” is trying to wordsmith away what millions of doctors, scientists and mothers across the globe know to be true – an unborn baby’s heartbeat.
An unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable around six weeks of pregnancy, and, for many mothers, hearing that heartbeat is one of their first tangible experiences with their unborn baby.
But as states move to pass heartbeat bills, abortion activists are attacking the fact that unborn babies have a heartbeat at six weeks at all.
Actress and abortion activist Alyssa Milano is one of them.
On Wednesday, she wrote on Twitter, “Dear Press, stop calling them ‘heartbeat’ bills and call them ‘fetal pole cardiac activity’ bills.”
A writer at The Atlantic tried a similar claim a few years ago. Moira Weigel, a writer, Harvard graduate and doctoral candidate at Yale University, argued that unborn babies’ heartbeats at six weeks are “imaginary” as she attacked pro-lifers’ attempts to pass heartbeat bills. The publication received numerous complaints from scientists, doctors and others about its inaccuracy, and it resulted in an embarrassing re-write of her entire article, along with a long list of corrections.
It is well established that an unborn child’s heart begins to beat during the earliest stages of pregnancy, typically between four to six weeks after fertilization. In 2016, researchers at the University of Oxford announced findings that the heart may actually begin beating earlier – as soon as 16 days after conception.
But it is easier for abortion activists to try to deny this science with ridiculous wordplay than it is to defend the fact that an abortion kills a living, unique human being whose heart is already beating, as National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis noted this week.
“Under the guise of being the real champions of science, they reduce a human heartbeat to utter meaninglessness,” she wrote in response to Milano and others. “To avoid defending abortion for what it is, they resort to blatant dehumanization of living human beings. Heartbeat bills such as Georgia’s won’t survive legal challenge, but their chief success is in exposing the abortion-rights movement as being deeply anti-science.”
Scientific evidence increasingly supports the pro-life position. And polls are showing that younger generations of voters support heartbeat laws. As more details about life in the womb become widely known, there is strong hope that even more Americans will support protections for unborn life.
