"Or, honestly, to predict that pregnancy is going to continue until delivery." For plenty of people, she says, this activity is detected and the pregnancy still ends in a miscarriage. Law The Supreme Court Heads Toward Reversing Abortion Rights Since then, over a dozen states have passed similar laws, but Texas' is the first to go into effect. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health policy, the first such law was passed in North Dakota in 2013, but it was struck down in the courts. The term "fetal heartbeat" has been used in laws restricting access to abortion for years. That sound "usually can't be heard with our Doppler machines until about 10 weeks." Later in a pregnancy is when a clinician might use the term "fetal heartbeat," after the sound of the heart valves can be heard, she says. "So those terms are very purposefully used - and are also misleading." Obstetricians don't usually start using the term "fetus" until at least eight weeks into the pregnancy.īut "fetus" may have an appeal that the word "embryo" does not, Kern says: "The term 'fetus' certainly evokes images of a well-formed baby, so it's advantageous to use that term instead of 'embryo' - which may not be as easy for the public to feel strongly about, since embryos don't look like a baby," she explains. In fact, "fetus" isn't technically accurate at six weeks of gestation either, says Kerns, since "embryo" is the scientific term for that stage of development. National What The Texas Abortion Ban Does - And What It Means For Other States Kerns adds that health care providers might use the term "fetal heartbeat" in conversations with patients during this early stage of pregnancy, but it's not actually a clinical term. "In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart." "What we're really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity," she explains.
Jennifer Kerns, an OB-GYN and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. That's why "the term 'fetal heartbeat' is pretty misleading," says Dr. "The flickering that we're seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you 'hear' is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine." "At six weeks of gestation, those valves don't exist," she explains. The sound generated by an ultrasound in very early pregnancy is quite different, she says. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "When I use a stethoscope to listen to an patient's heart, the sound that I'm hearing is caused by the opening and closing of the cardiac valves," says Dr. Jennifer Kerns, OB-GYN, University of California, San Francisco In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart.
What we're really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. The law defines "fetal heartbeat" as "cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac" and claims that a pregnant woman could use that signal to determine "the likelihood of her unborn child surviving to full-term birth."
The Texas abortion law that went into effect last fall reads: "A physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child." Supreme Court intends to ovterturn Roe v. Note: We are republishing this story after the news site Politico published a leaked draft opinion suggesting the U.S. And the sound that you "hear" is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine. What the ultrasound machine detects in an embryo at six weeks of pregnancy is actually just electrical activity from cells that aren't yet a heart. The term "fetal heartbeat," as used in the anti-abortion law in Texas, is misleading and not based on science, say physicians who specialize in reproductive health.
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