Much as with “Latinx,” the progressive position on the heartbeat of the unborn is deeply out of step with how most human beings discuss the question when they are not trying to stay ideologically on-message. Paige Winfield Cunningham of the Washington Post acknowledges this basic reality in a “news analysis” of the flap over Stacey Abrams’s describing the heartbeat in the womb as “a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.” As Cunningham notes, while “medical professionals note a distinction between the sound heard early in pregnancy compared with later further development of the heart” — a fig-leaf distinction seized upon by WaPo “fact checker” Glenn Kessler — that is not how normal people talk:
For women going through pregnancy, that’s not the message they get on popular pregnancy websites or even in their own doctor’s office. It’s common for OB/GYNs to check for a “heartbeat” on the first prenatal visit — and for women to experience an immense feeling of relief when a fluttering sound is heard. Consider this language from leading pregnancy websites describing embryonic development at six weeks:
- TheBump.com: “Baby’s heart is typically beating away by six weeks.”
- Whattoexpect.com: “Your baby’s heart has started to beat sometime between week 5 and now.”
- BabyCenter.com: “Your baby’s heart isn’t fully developed, but cells in the heart tube have started beating fast, around 160 times a minute. You may hear the sound this week if you have an early ultrasound.”
- Johns Hopkins places it even earlier, saying on its website that “the heart is beating” by the end of four weeks.
Government-backed websites in other countries also refer to a heartbeat by six weeks:
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The U.K.’s National Health Service: “The heart can sometimes be seen beating on a vaginal ultrasound scan at this stage.”
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Pregnancy, Birth and Baby, a website backed by the Australian government: “If you have an ultrasound in the sixth week, you may be able to see the baby’s heart beating.”
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Public Health Agency of Canada: “The tissues that will form the heart begin to beat. The heartbeat can be detected with ultrasound at around 6 weeks of pregnancy.”
Cunningham cites the work of our own indefatigable John McCormack in pointing out that even Planned Parenthood acknowledged “a very basic beating heart” in an unborn child until it edited its website within the last several weeks to keep up with Democrats’ current talking points (a pattern of Orwellian rewriting that has become all too common on matters of leftist social orthodoxies).
The challenge for pro-lifers in dealing with the very earliest stages of pregnancy is passing what I call “the eyeball test” — the moral intuition of ordinary citizens, often formed without the sort of philosophical rigor we demand from opinion writers or jurists. But the reality is, just about any pregnant woman and anyone around her — including her doctors and nurses — talks and acts as if she is carrying a human child. Only when we turn to political and legal rhetoric in favor of abortion is that reality suspended. In the long run, I’d rather be on the side of reality.