Dan points out that the “fig-leaf distinction” upon which Stacey Abrams’s peculiar comments about fetal heartbeats rests is not one that is observed by “normal people” — or even by Planned Parenthood. Whatever differences might exist between the heart at six weeks and the heart at ten weeks, Dan notes, are not recognized by “most human beings” when “they are not trying to stay ideologically on-message.”
This is true, of course. And it raises an important question: Why does Stacey Abrams care in the first place?
When my two children were in utero, I didn’t care about the fine distinctions between their hearts at six weeks and their hearts at 20 weeks, because at neither of those junctures — or at any juncture, for that matter — was I interested in killing them. My view then, as now, was that my unborn children were alive, that they were worthy of my protection, and that, if they were left alone, they’d soon come join me in the outside world. Six weeks? Twelve weeks? Twenty weeks? All the same to me.
Some states care about the six week point, because they have used it as a marker after which abortion should be illegal. Crudely put, the view of these states — irrespective of whether that view represents a standalone moral case or a concession to public opinion — is that abortion is acceptable before the heart starts beating, but unacceptable afterwards, and that, as the heart starts beating at six weeks, the cut-off should be set there. In this context, the nature of the heartbeat does, indeed, matter. If, as Stacey Abrams claims, the sounds that parents are hearing at their six-week appointments is fake, then it doesn’t make sense to set “heartbeat”laws at six weeks. If what those parents are hearing is real, those laws make sense on their own terms.
But here’s the thing: Stacey Abrams doesn’t believe in any limits on abortion. During an interview with the Atlanta-Journal Constitution in May, Abrams said that she did not support any legal limits on abortion. “My support of abortion is grounded in the belief that this is not the role of our government, it is not the role of lawmakers,” Abrams said. “It is the responsibility of women and their doctors, women and their families, women and whomever they choose to bring into the conversation, but it is not the conversation for government to be having.”
So why does it matter to her when the heartbeat starts?
I’ll share my theory: Because the existence of a heartbeat is pretty inconvenient if your aim is to smother the question in euphemisms. Advocates of legal abortion love euphemisms: “pro-choice,” “reproductive justice,” “between a woman and her doctor.” They love detached phrases, too: “pre-viability,” “medical procedure,” “meaningless clump of cells.” As George Orwell noted, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” But a heartbeat — the boom, boom, boom of a living person’s body — makes all that pretty difficult. “You want to kill that?” the euphemizer can be asked. And, when they are asked that, they have only a handful of options: To literally run away, to say “yes, actually,” or to insist that the “that” in the question isn’t actually a “that” after all. Abrams couldn’t choose the first two, so she picked the lattermost course. It was bad — but it beat the other two avenues hands down.