![]() Jennifer Kerns, an OB-GYN and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. That’s why “the term ‘fetal heartbeat’ is pretty misleading,” says Dr. “The flickering that we’re seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine.” “At six weeks of gestation, those valves don’t exist,” she explains. The sound generated by an ultrasound in very early pregnancy is quite different, she says. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “When I use a stethoscope to listen to an patient’s heart, the sound that I’m hearing is caused by the opening and closing of the cardiac valves,” says Dr. The new law defines “fetal heartbeat” as “cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac” and claims that a pregnant woman could use that signal to determine “the likelihood of her unborn child surviving to full-term birth.”īut the medical-sounding term “fetal heartbeat” is being used in this law - and others like it - in a misleading way, say physicians who specialize in reproductive health. The Texas abortion law that went into effect this week reads: “A physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.”
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