We know there’s a heartbeat. But we’re living lies.
We know there’s a heartbeat. But we’re living lies.
A baby was born on February 2 because when a scared teenager walked in for her appointment at the abortion clinic, someone explained to her what would happen in the abortion: The doctor would stop the baby’s heart from beating. I’m sure the person didn’t use the word baby, but once you know it has a heart, it’s hard to pretend it isn’t a baby. The details don’t always come out, though. Abortion thrives in the darkness of euphemisms and lies — that abortion doesn’t hurt, that abortion is mere freedom and choice and empowerment.
Stand outside an abortion clinic someday and look into the eyes of desperately sad 17-year-old black and Hispanic girls and see whether you can keep those talking points straight. This particular girl was still early in her pregnancy, and yet the doctor would have to stop the heart from beating. The young mother wanted nothing of that reality. She left without getting the abortion. When truth is told, women are set free from the shackles of the lies of the culture of death that sometimes insists on abortion.
Knowing this, the New York Times couldn’t resist a Valentine’s Day dehumanizing attack on the innocent unborn at six weeks. “Abortion Opponents Hear a ‘Heartbeat.’ Most Experts Hear Something Else.” The Times wants you to believe that because it is not a fully developed heart, it doesn’t count as a heartbeat. It’s “only a primitive tube of cardiac cells that emit electric pulses and pump blood.”
The piece contends:
The consensus among most medical experts is that the electrical activity picked up on an ultrasound at six weeks is not the sound of a heart beating and does not guarantee a live birth. The sound expectant mothers hear during a scan is created by the machine itself, which translates the waves of electrical activity into something audible.
Doctors are partly to blame for the confusion. Many physicians whose patients are excited about a desired pregnancy will use the word “heartbeat” to describe the cardiac activity heard on an early ultrasound. The word has even crept into the medical literature.
You don’t have to be a doctor to find this absurd.
Fresh off giving birth, Leah Libresco Sargeant, a former atheist blogger turned Catholic, took to tweeting in response to the Times:
This objection is quite odd. Yes, the Doppler heartbeat is the result of using high pitched sound waves to track blood flow and produce a sound you can hear. By the same logic, an ultrasound picture isn’t “real” because it translates sound waves into a visual representation.
Instead of admitting there is a heartbeat early on, they want you to believe that heartbeat bills are merely pro-life propaganda.
And at the same time. if you go to Planned Parenthood’s own website, under the question of “What happens during week 5–6?,” the abortion giant’s answer is: “A very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop.”
In his Valentine’s Day reaction to the Times, my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that even the “paper of record” has acknowledged, on more than one occasion, that heartbeats are detectable at six weeks in a pregnancy. The Times writers were simply stating fact at the time. But now, to state this fact is impermissible, because it means that unborn developing babies will be seen as just what they are. And that would be a devastating blow to the sexual revolution and its political values, which claim to be about empowering women, though in reality they get men off the hook when they father babies. Abortion is a great gift to men who want to treat women for their own gratification.
Of course, so many decades into the madness that has been inflicted on the sexes, girls from a young age equate sex with power. It’s use or be used, so she might even learn to be the aggressor. That’s often because no adult in her life bothered to tell her that she is worth so much more. She is a beautiful gift, and she can expect more from men. Often, when women expect more from men, men realize it’s worth earning her love before simply using her.
Of course, you don’t even have to go to Planned Parenthood or the Times archives to acknowledge the obvious. We all know that when a woman wants to be pregnant — or welcomes and unplanned surprise — she counts on that heartbeat, checking in on it at doctor’s visits and sonograms. She does everything she can to keep that baby healthy.
Experts are quoted as is convenient for the Times. The medical realities cannot be spoken now because most Americans aren’t hardened ideologues when it comes to abortion. Stopping a beating heart sounds quite barbaric. I talked with a girl at 12 weeks recently who was in the process of a two-day abortion process. They insert a laminaria the first day, to widen the cervix. Depending how deep in it is, she may wind up walking in with a dead baby inside her the next day. She was desperate and resigned. She told me she was dizzy. She looked like she was about to throw up. This is the reality of abortion in America. Anyone who has a heart would be honest about it and work together — whatever our political and moral views are — to make sure women know what they are getting into and that they have an actual choice, at the very least. Acknowledging that women deserve better than an unnecessarily dead baby should be the goal.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.