The Patriot Post® · A Fetal Heartbeat Fact-Checking Disaster

The Party of Science™ is in fact anti-science. We’ve said that before, but election-denying Georgia Governor Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams provided the latest example of denying the science.

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

We had no idea that there were people (probably men) whose job it is to pump in sound effects during ultrasounds at doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals around the country. But hey, go easy; Abrams, like Ketanji Brown Jackson, isn’t a biologist.

Now seriously, experiencing that heartbeat for the first time is one of the most exhilarating experiences for mothers and fathers. Elsewhere in the media, by the way, there was buzz about babies in the womb tasting things, and generally speaking babies developing in the womb are a marvel to behold.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, however, Democrats have become obsessed with abortion, growing increasingly radical in their demand for unfettered access to this barbarous form of “healthcare” in which only one of two patients makes it out alive. Democrats claim abortion “rights” are a winning issue for them, and, unfortunately, they may be right given the anger they stoke among women.

Plus they’ll do anything to not have to talk about the economy or any of Joe Biden’s various disasters.

Hence, Abrams is out with her anti-science garbage. Her strategy is targeting Republican-controlled states (like her own) with heartbeat laws protecting children in utero after a heartbeat can be detected, which happens around six weeks.

Fortunately, media fact-checkers jumped in to set things straight. Or not.

“FWIW, ‘fetal heartbeat’ is a misnomer,” tweeted The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. “The ultrasound picks up electrical activity generated by an embryo. The so-called ‘heartbeat’ sound you hear is created by the ultrasound. Not until 10 weeks can the opening and closing of cardiac valves be detected by a Doppler machine.” Kessler is “scientifically and medically incorrect,” according to radiologist Pradheep J. Shanker.

Kessler also wrote a “fact-check” this week on whether it’s true that Democrats support abortion “up until the moment of birth,” though somehow on that question he totally avoided making a final judgment while still accusing Republicans of being “disingenuous” for things they did not, in fact, even say.

What a hack.

Kessler is one of many media/activist examples of trying to “clarify” the subject by completely muddying the waters on what constitutes a heart, what the sound is, etc.

Well, how about Planned Parenthood? Its website has information about a fetus at five to six weeks, including “a very basic beating heart.” Scratch that. For some reason, Planned Parenthood’s website no longer includes that information.

Speaking of Planned Parenthood, though, its long-overdue 2020-2021 annual report (covering FY2020) finally came out, and the nation’s largest abortion mill terminated more preborn babies than ever —383,460 abortions were performed in FY2020, up from 354,871 the year prior. Meanwhile, its other health services were down, and abortions now outnumber breast screenings (not mammograms, which Planned Parenthood does not provide). And for an organization promoting “choice,” there’s really only one choice: There were only 1,940 adoption referrals that same year, down from 2,667 the prior year and 4,279 the year before that.

The trends at Planned “Parenthood” are certainly striking.

But the real problem, at least according to abortion zealot and general wokescold Elizabeth Warren, is pro-life clinics. In a letter this week to Heartbeat International, Warren and several other Democrat senators expressed “concerns” about “sensitive health information” collected after “luring pregnant people” (note: not just women) who are supposedly duped by “a variety of false and misleading tactics” at the hands of pro-life ministries. We can’t seem to recall her complaining about false and misleading claims about Planned Parenthood and, say, mammograms.

Nevertheless, Warren’s teammates at Time Magazine had a profile on her intrepid efforts the very next day, complete with the requisite hand-wringing over the looming threat of the pro-life cause. No evidence is provided by either Democrats or Time of any wrongdoing on the part of pro-lifers, but they strongly insinuate that’s no proof of innocence.

To bring this full circle, the only people who have no need whatsoever to prove their innocence are babies in the womb. Yet those are precisely the people Democrats are most eager to deny and eliminate, the truth and the science be damned.