The woman some people in 2020 wanted to see a heartbeat away from the presidency has just claimed that six-week-old unborn babies with beating hearts don’t have a heartbeat. In fact, Georgia gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams (D) claimed Wednesday that the fetal heartbeats in question are just an illusion foisted on America by a patriarchy bent on controlling women’s bodies.
Fox News reported Thursday on Abrams’ revelation, which she expressed at an event at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center in Atlanta.
“‘There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,’ Abrams, who is running against incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, told the audience,” Fox related. “‘It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.’” (Clever, that patriarchy! Video below.)
Abrams seemed to be responding to Georgia’s recently passed pro-life law. “The Georgia legislation, known as the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (Life) Act, or ‘heartbeat’ bill, bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — sometimes as early as six weeks,” Fox continued.
Fox also pointed out that Abrams was pro-life until she was 30 — and decided to run for office as a member of the pro-abortion party, the Democrats. There is precedent for this, though: Ex-vice president Al Gore flipped from pro-life to pro-prenatal infanticide when he sought higher office as a Democrat.
This all could be coincidence, of course. The political realm is chock full of coincidences, such as when one candidate is comfortably ahead in five or so swing states on Election Day eve and then, almost magically, the other guy is leading in every single one in the morning.
What’s surely not coincidence is that just two weeks before Abrams made her claim, a couple of “medical professors” had been quoted by National Public Radio as opining likewise about six-week-old babies’ heartbeats. As The College Fix reported September 8:
“What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity,” Professor Jennifer Kerns of the University of California San Francisco said. “In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart,” Kerns told NPR. She is affiliated with the Bixby Center at UCSF, which advocates for abortion.
Emory University medical school Professor Nisha Verma attributed the sounds of a fetal heartbeat to the ultrasound machine. Verma is also an abortionist.
“At six weeks of gestation, those [cardiac] valves don’t exist,” Verma said. “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.”
This all could lend itself to humor. And, in fact, an astute commenter at American Thinker added perspective while poking fun at a “fact-checker” who’d later echoed Verma’s claim.
“Fact check: Did [Stacey] lie? When Stacey uses a microphone to tell her lies, it is not really Stacey that is lying,” the poster observed. “The electrical impulses are used to create an amplified sound that is not her voice. It is the PA system that we hear[,] not Stacey. Therefore, it is not Stacey that we hear lying.”
Interestingly, we never heard this Abrams heartbeat argument in the media until right after Texas enacted a pro-life heartbeat law. The cynical may call this all too convenient, but it could be just another political-realm coincidence.
Of course, as in a court of law, media can find a couple of “experts” to take any position they want espoused. But know that the aforementioned Kerns and Verma do not express what the Left has touted and worshiped — “scientific consensus.”
Consider that a “fetal heartbeat may first be detected by a vaginal ultrasound as early as 5 1/2 to 6 weeks after gestation,” Healthline wrote in an article approved by an OB/GYN. This was echoed in medical-expert-approved pieces — written with no political agenda in mind — by website What to Expect, the Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins as well.
Then, a physician described as a “prominent radiologist” provided the following:
Shanker added, “Ultrasound picks up density and motion” and “can certainly pick up cardiac contraction,” but it “does NOT pick up electrical activity (that is another bit of misinformation).”
LifeNews also weighed in (tweet below).
Yet to an extent, Kerns and Verma may be engaging in deception with half-truths. Consider the claim that the fetal heartbeat is just “a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity.” The federal government website the National Institutes of Health writes the following about all heartbeats (including adults’):
“Electrical signals cause muscles to contract. Your heart has a special electrical system called the cardiac conduction system. This system controls the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat. With each heartbeat, an electrical signal travels from the top of the heart to the bottom.”
Then, how is it that we can use an electrocardiogram to, as the Mayo Clinic explains, record “the electrical signals in the heart” and painlessly “detect heart problems and monitor the heart’s health”?
So here’s the real fact check: All human hearts are “a grouping of cells” that operate involving “electrical activity”!
Why, if you eliminated all the electrical activity in the unusually large grouping of cells known as Stacey Abrams, she’d be dead.
Speaking of Abrams, her remarks have made some mockingly state that she doesn’t have much of a brain. In reality, though, her intellect may be sufficient. The real question is: Does she have a heart?
