Friday, September 23, 2022

Stacy Abrams Claims that Fetus Heartbeats are a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

 

  Woke Stacey Abrams, who claimed an election was stolen long before Trump ever made such assertions, has said something absolutely insane.

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

Taken literally, Abrams is claiming that ultrasound machines, relied upon by millions of doctors, are intended to deceive patients and are prejudiced against women.

Yet somehow the same media which has a meltdown every time Trump makes fun of windmills, and labels Republicans “science deniers”, has no problem with Abrams’ complete ignorance of science.


Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller replied on Twitter: “Apparently, Abrams thinks there is a vast OBGYN conspiracy where moms and dads have been going to doctors offices for decades to listen to their baby’s heartbeat when, in fact, it was apparently a prerecorded audio file.”

As the Washington Examiner put it: “No sane person believes that General Electric and Siemens designed ultrasound machines to subjugate women.”

Although her ridiculous claims need no refutation, let’s do it anyway. The assertion that a “fetal heartbeat” is a manipulative trick designed by men to oppress women has been debunked many times.

The op-ed in the Examiner pointed out that many medical journals refer to a fetal heartbeat even at six weeks. A 2011 article in the Journal of Prenatal Medicine said: “At the end of the fourth week of gestation, the heartbeats of the embryo begin.”

The fact that unborn babies have hearts at six weeks is not refuted by anyone other than Abrams. The above-referenced article in the Journal of Prenatal Medicine says that the heart’s “development starts at the third week of gestation.”

And a story in The Atlantic in 2017, which apparently tried to claim something similar to what Abrams said, was forced to issue a major retraction. It said, “This article originally stated that there is ‘no heart to speak of’ in a six-week-old fetus. In fact, the heart has already begun to form by that point in a pregnancy.”

The media may eventually catch up with the science. After all, they eventually figured out that cloth masks don’t work, and that the Hunter Biden laptop is genuine. They’re just a bit slower than the rest of us.

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