One of Planned Parenthood’s favored legal arguments against the heartbeat laws passed in many states is that fetal heartbeats aren’t “real.” Planned Parenthood has relied on the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), whose “Guide to Language and Abortion” and many amicus briefs said that “a fetal heartbeat exists only after the chambers of the heart have developed and can be detected via ultrasound, which typically occurs around 17 to 20 weeks’ gestation.” Thus, said ACOG, “there is no recognizable ‘heartbeat’ from a clinical perspective,” and “[w]hat pregnant [women] may hear is the ultrasound machine translating electronic impulses that signify fetal cardiac activity.” ACOG said this to courts over and over and over and over and over and over. In a noteworthy reversal, Planned Parenthood just admitted that ACOG was wrong.
Planned Parenthood’s argument was always dubious on the merits. Put aside that the distinction between “cardiac activity”/“electrical impulses” and “fetal heartbeats” is legally irrelevant because these laws generally define fetal heartbeats as early cardiac activity. What’s more damning is that — until this fact became inconvenient — Planned Parenthood’s own website said that at 5-6 weeks, “[a] very basic beating heart and circulatory system begins to develop.” Johns Hopkins Medicine says the same: “[t]he heart is beating.” As Part II of this recent brief explains in detail, that longstanding understanding squares with medical evidence — which shows that the heart beats and circulates blood even before it is fully developed — and the scientific literature that consistently refers to early fetal heartbeats.
One would reasonably expect ACOG, an organization that heralds itself as a “premier professional membership organization” and a “leading provider of authoritative scientific data,” to know all this. Instead, ACOG claimed that no heartbeat exists until 17-20 weeks because the heart’s chambers are not formed until that point. That’s false. It is common knowledge that “[t]he 4 chambers form by the end of week 7,” and the “fetal heart is already fully developed by 9 1/7 weeks gestation.” Many journal articles even have a picture of the 4-chambered, 7-week heart.
Embarrassingly, even Planned Parenthood has now distanced itself from ACOG, albeit hiding its retreat in a recent footnote in a South Carolina filing: “[a]fter consulting with experts,” it “understand[s] that a heart forms earlier than that.” So much for ACOG being the “experts.” Planned Parenthood also concedes that all four chambers can be viewed well before 17 weeks.
Within the past two months, ACOG quietly deleted its grossly inaccurate claim from its ideological “Guide to Language and Abortion.” Yet, ACOG has apparently never publicly retracted this statement or provided an explanation for how it got basic scientific facts so wrong — and misled courts in the process.
How did this happen? The answer is simple and echoed in other medical debates: when it comes to controversial policy issues, medical interest groups like ACOG put their politics over science. ACOG seeks not to protect mothers and their unborn children but to advance its abortion agenda. For years, “science” has been merely “the ideological veneer for [ACOG’s] political position[s].” It’s time for courts to recognize that reality — and reject efforts to adjudicate the people’s laws by the positions of unelected, self-interested, and anti-science medical interest groups.