Can Stacey Abrams and Planned Parenthood rewrite human development?
For most in the legitimate medical community facts matter.
But for Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who holds no medical degree but champions herself as the voice of women’s rights, not so much.
Abrams boldly stated that there is "no such thing" as a fetal heartbeat at six weeks of gestation last week at an event in Atlanta - without evidence or research to back her thoughts.
Abrams further claimed that the sound of such fetal heartbeats is "manufactured" by men seeking to "take control" of women.
Do politicians get to change science?
Those would be the medical personnel who each and every day view the cardiac activity of the human hearts of preborn babies while treating these babies and pregnant the women who carry them.
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These remarks also vilify men who may have a welcome part in a woman making a pregnancy choice, but whom she presumes could force women into that pregnancy choice.
And Abrams openly insults the intelligence of women who, as they make pregnancy choices, are often seeking factual information - not the personal beliefs uttered by a political candidate.
How can this rhetoric be used by Big Abortion?
Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States, which also has a history of stretching the definition of human life to fit the Big Abortion agenda and is set to spend a historic $50 million on midterm elections, was quick jump on Abrams’ nonsensical bandwagon.
Just two days after Abrams’ comments, Planned Parenthood stealth-edited a “fact sheet” on its website to mirror Abrams comments to inaccurately state there is no heartbeat at six weeks of fetal development.
In a concerted twist of the facts, the Planned Parenthood website states:
“A part of the embryo starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it's not a fully-formed heart — it's the earliest stage of the heart developing.”
Does life change as it develops?
The reality is that human biology reveals that life is different at every stage of development. And just like growth and aging after birth continues throughout our lifetimes, fetal development typically follows a predictable course.
Physicians who care for pregnant women agree that hearing a developing baby’s heartbeat is one of the milestones of pregnancy. And for the mother, hearing it during prenatal visits is typically reassuring.
The American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) in its patient guide pamphlet states, “At about 22 days after fertilization your child’s heart begins to circulate his or her own blood, unique from your own, and has a heartbeat that can be detected on ultrasound.”
What does science say about the development of the human heart?
The embryonic heartbeat is the first sign of early pregnancy on ultrasound, which can be visualized in transvaginal ultrasound at approximately 5 weeks gestation.
The heart of the embryo continues to develop over the next several weeks. It is fully formed around 10 weeks gestation.
Incredibly , the heartbeats of a mother and her unborn fetus actually synchronize when she breathes rhythmically, researchers have said.
However, in 2016 a team funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) at the University of Oxford demonstrated very early beating of the heart in mouse embryos which, if extrapolated to the human heart, suggests beating potentially as early as 16 days after conception.
While current technology might not be able to detect this early heartbeat, this study reveals the first of our three billion heartbeats could begin at the time of the mother’s first missed menstrual cycle.
The development of the early human heart is truly remarkable:
• At five weeks of pregnancy, the developing heart is made up of two tubes that have fused in the middle, creating a trunk with four tubes branching off. The heart begins to beat, and it may be possible to detect it using vaginal ultrasound.
• At six weeks of pregnancy, the basic heart tube has looped, forming an S-shape and creating an area for the ventricles.
• At seven weeks of pregnancy, the ventricles and atria of the heart begin to separate and develop.
• At eight weeks of pregnancy, the valves between the atria and ventricles of the heart form.
• At nine weeks of pregnancy, the aorta and pulmonary vein form
• At just ten weeks of pregnancy, the heart is fully formed.
How does ultrasound reveal life even in the very earliest stages of life?
Ultrasound is used to detect motion. The fetal heart contracting during a scan is indicative of life.
The human fetal heart is routinely evaluated during pregnancy.
The fetal ultrasound (sonogram) is an imaging technique that uses sound waves to produce images of a fetus in the uterus.
Doppler ultrasound is a widely accepted as a valuable diagnostic tool in obstetric medicine.
Fetal heart Doppler is a non-invasive diagnostic instrument used to detect and measure the fetal heart rate by emitting and receiving ultrasonic sound waves and emitting the change or shift in pitch frequency of these sound waves. Fetal echocardiography is an exam provides a detailed picture of a baby's heart. It might be used to confirm or rule out a congenital heart defect.
The fetal heart rate gradually increases with gestational age from approximately 110 beats per minute at six weeks gestation to approximately 159 bpm at eight weeks gestation. The overall prognosis of the pregnancy improves with increasing heart rate.
Despite the rhetoric of politics and the agenda of Big Abortion to rewrite science, the life of the preborn cannot be denied.
In stark contrast to the stance of Planned Parenthood, which profits from every abortion performed, and a political candidate looking for the Big Abortion vote, the American College of Pediatricians confirms that life begins at fertilization:
The predominance of human biological research confirms that human life begins at conception—fertilization. At fertilization, the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism, a member of the species Homo sapiens, needing only the proper environment in order to grow and develop.
Abortion stops a beating heart. Abrams and Planned Parenthood may want to try pretending that the unborn child’s heart was not beating in the first place to bolster their justification for abortion, but their efforts fall flat since this claim has no relationship to the truth.
