Embryos Don’t Have Hearts

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/embryos-dont-have-hearts.html?fbclid=IwAR2AAaO6IFRVp-Cva0R1b_qiyanScdzUc4qnVMHyiQVVGtM-wZLlabHfX0s

May 24, 2019
By Katie Heaney

Within the last few years, six U.S. states — Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, and North Dakota — have passed so-called “heartbeat bills,” a term that’s become shorthand for a proposed ban on abortions beginning six weeks into a pregnancy, or the point at which a “fetal heartbeat” can be detected. Four more states have similar bills pending. Anti-abortion activists have doubled down on “heartbeat” messaging — in a recent news release regarding the ACLU’s legal challenge of the Ohio bill, the state’s leading anti-abortion group, Ohio Right to Life, used the term eight times in 300 words.

But obstetricians say the term “fetal heartbeat” is misleading

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To wit: though pulsing cells can be detected in embryos as early as six weeks, this rhythm — detected by a doctor, via ultrasound — cannot be called a “heartbeat,” because embryos don’t have hearts. What is detectable at or around six weeks can more accurately be called “cardiac activity,” says Robyn Schickler, OB/GYN and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. The difference between “cardiac activity” and “heartbeat” may seem linguistically minimal, but Schickler and others argue otherwise. At this stage, she says, what doctors can detect is essentially communication between a group of what will eventually become cardiac cells.

“From very early on, different cells are programmed to do different things for what is eventually a fully functioning human body,” says Jennifer Kerns, an OB/GYN and professor at the University of California in San Francisco. “These are cells that are programmed with electrical activity, which will eventually control the heart rate — they send a signal telling the heart to contract, once there is a heart.” It is this early activity which ultrasounds detect — not a heartbeat.

In a doctor/patient setting, though, says Shickler, physicians have used the term “heartbeat” or “fetal heartbeat” to convey to patients with wanted pregnancies that fetal development is proceeding as it should. “If I have a patient in front of me who is excited about her pregnancy, and hoping for signs that it’s currently developing properly, that little flicker can tell us that, at that point in the pregnancy, things look good,” says Sarah Horvath, a family planning fellow at The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That things “look good” is not equivalent to declaring a fetus viable, and patients can and do experience miscarriage, stillbirth, or other developmental problems after seeing that flicker on an ultrasound. To someone who wants to be pregnant, it’s merely a good sign.

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