A federal appeals court has allowed Georgia’s heartbeat bill to take effect, overturning a lower-court ruling that had blocked the law on the rationale that it violated the supposed constitutional right to abortion invented in Roe v. Wade.
The law, like heartbeat bills passed in about a dozen states over the past three years, prohibits abortion after an unborn child’s heartbeat can be detected, which usually takes place around six weeks into pregnancy. This latest decision is a signal of what’s to come: a series of court decisions overturning previous injunctions and blocks on pro-life laws that were deemed unconstitutional under the Roe regime.
Evidently, some reporters remain as opposed as ever to the logic of heartbeat bills. To give just one example, here’s how the Associated Press described Georgia’s law, which the report deemed “restrictive”:
The law, which had been barred from taking effect, bans most abortions once a “detectable human heartbeat” is present. Cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in cells within an embryo that will eventually become the heart as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before many pregnancies are detected.
This is just one instance of a common phenomenon, which I’ve written about here at NR in the past, compiling examples of major publications using absurd phrases to delegitimize the notion that the unborn child has a heartbeat. Reporters have dedicated full pieces to attempting to debunk the science of the fetal heartbeat, and they regularly place the word “heartbeat” in scare quotes. Others have opted for unnecessarily sterile replacement phrases such as “cardiac rhythm,” “fetal cardiac activity,” and, my personal favorite, “a cluster of pulsing cells.” Articles have cited abortionists, billed as medical experts, who describe the fetal heartbeat as “a group of cells with electrical activity” and “fetal pole cardiac activity.”
The Guardian even updated its style guide on this issue, taking the advice of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — a powerful abortion lobby disguised as a medical group — citing the group’s statement that “ACOG does not use the term ‘heartbeat’ to describe these legislative bans on abortion because it is misleading language, out of step with the anatomical and clinical realities of that stage of pregnancy.”
It is easy to see through these sorts of silly efforts to disprove basic science or construct linguistic devices to obscure reality. As I pointed out yesterday in a post about Merriam-Webster dictionary redefining the word “woman” to include men who identify as women, efforts to redefine terms to obscure truth is a signal of a position too weak to defend itself any other way.