Stacey Abrams Corrected Abortion Misinformation, and Republicans Lost Their Minds

[Nevilledog]

https://jezebel.com/stacey-abrams-corrected-abortion-misinformation-and-re-1849569712

On a panel this week in Atlanta, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams fact-checked the popular anti-abortion claim that a fetus has a heartbeat at six weeks of pregnancy. Conservatives call their bills banning abortion after that point “heartbeat bans,” and plenty of media outlets still use the term, even though it’s medically incorrect.

“There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,” Abrams said. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body away from her.”

Conservatives, of course, immediately lost their shit, with Fox’s Will Cain calling the statement “QAnon-plus level.”

Link to tweet

But Abrams is correct that there’s no real heartbeat that early in pregnancy. Not only do six-week embryos not have hearts, but the sound of pulsing cells that will eventually become a heart “is created by the [ultrasound] machine itself, which translates the waves of electrical activity into something audible,” per the New York Times. It is, really and truly, a manufactured sound.

The sound wasn’t invented for the purpose of controlling people’s bodies, but anti-abortion advocates certainly use it for that purpose now. The crusade started with laws that mandate pre-abortion ultrasounds and continued with crisis pregnancy centers that prey on women who are pregnant and scared, before later morphing into a campaign to pass “heartbeat” bills.

*snip*