Pro-abortion lexicon: don’t say “heartbeat” or “living”
[This article is a transcript of “Pro-abortion lexicon: don’t say ‘living’” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
Okay, are you ready for this mouthful: “A Lexicon for First-Trimester Ultrasounds: Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound Consensus Conference Recommendations.”
They’re trying to tell medical providers who do ultrasounds how they should talk about first-trimester pregnancies. Turns out if you look a little more closely at the author credentials, several of them have either authored or at least signed onto pro-abortion advocacy statements, including letters to the editor objecting to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and including that more medical professionals should speak out in defense of adolescent abortion access. Others of the authors are just straight abortion providers, and do you think any of this is listed in the conflicts of interest? No.
Anyway, shock to no one, they don’t like the term “heartbeats” or “heart activity” or “heart motion” or just anything with the word “heart.” I do appreciate that they acknowledge that, historically, all of these terms have been used in medicine. This is in contrast to abortion advocates acting like pro-lifers made up the idea that embryos have hearts.
[Read sources establishing that embryos have hearts].
In fact, medical professionals have been telling expecting parents about their embryo’s heartbeat for many many years. But since a few years ago, when anti-abortion activists started trying to pass heartbeat legislation, all of a sudden the term heartbeat is super unscientific and inaccurate. They try to claim its inaccurate because the term “heart” implies a fully-formed organ, even though nobody said that it did.
They also say that cardiac development is gradual and incomplete during the gestational ages discussed, but the thing is: it’s also gradual all the way through the rest of the pregnancy and for a while after birth. Nobody is saying that, for example, a third-trimester fetus doesn’t have a heart.
Then they unironically end the paragraph talking about how the rate of cardiac activity should be reported as beats-per-minute. So it’s not a heartbeat. It’s just the beat of some kind of organ that has “cardiac activity,” and cardiac means heart.
Anyway, I fully expected this heartbeat nonsense, but what I didn’t expect was the next part.
They acknowledge that medical professionals have been using the terms “living” and “live” and “viable” when talking about first-trimester pregnancies. These terms are a problem, apparently, not because they’re actually incorrect, but because “these terms may be appropriated by people outside of the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and prescriptive legislation.”
In other words, “don’t acknowledge that embryos are living, because that might threaten abortion rights.”
[Read more – Describing miscarriage as “intrauterine death” threatens abortion rights]
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