On September 1st, 2021, the state of Texas enacted what is widely known as the “Heartbeat Bill.” On the ninth line of the fourth page of the bill, it is written that “a physician may not intentionally perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman… if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The bill rationalizes this statement by citing statistics which signify that “fetal heartbeat… has become a key medical predictor that an unborn child will reach live birth.” The bill works by making it an illegal act to have or assist an abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. It is enforced by private citizens, who can sue those who they believe are breaking this law, and can subsequently collect a monetary reward. Private citizens are any citizens who do not have an official position, so any average citizen is able to report.
Resources like Vox and NPR claim that a “fetal heartbeat” is usually indicated around six weeks of pregnancy, which is long before many women even know of their pregnancy. Vox went as far as to call the Texas law a “near-total” ban because of how unlikely it is for a woman to know that she is pregnant at that point of her pregnancy. Many women have irregular periods, and their cycle cannot be used to track pregnancy. In fact, Dr. Jennifer Kerns, an OB-GYN at the University of California in San Francisco said that there is only “a window of a few days, maybe a week or two at the most, where you can actually detect an intrauterine pregnancy [with an ultrasound] before you detect any kind of cardiac motion or electrical activity” (NPR). She claims that the bill’s intention was to nearly completely outlaw abortions.
Dr. Samantha Kaplan says that women who are more educated about their menstrual cycles tend to be wealthier than others and have access to such education, and are usually privileged to stop what they are doing and take a pregnancy test. Those who are poorer tend to not know as much about their menstrual cycles and are often too busy to pay mind to a pregnancy test. As a result, poorer women are more likely to be impacted by this bill.
Even the wording of the bill is misleading. Dr. Nisha Verma and Dr. Jennifer Kerns clarified to NPR that the concept of a “fetal heartbeat” ignores scientific distinctions. Verma says that the noise of a heartbeat in an adult is caused by the opening and closing of cardiac valves, but the sound of a heartbeat in an early-stage pregnancy’s ultrasound is not caused by the same action. At the six week point of gestation, those valves do not exist at all, and the “heartbeat” noise is actually a sound that the ultrasound machine makes when detecting electrical activity. Kerns says that this is not an indication of a functioning cardiovascular system. In addition to this, at six weeks of pregnancy the growth is not a fetus at all, but actually an embryo.
While support from Anti-abortion activists has been loud, many others have herded to Twitter, trending hashtags like #TexasWarOnWomen in protest of the bill. On September 9th, NPR reported that the Justice Department is attempting to sue Texas to prevent this bill from being enacted.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/86R/billtext/pdf/HB01500I.pdf
https://www.vox.com/22444100/texas-bans-abortion-6-weeks-supreme-court
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1033202132/texas-abortion-ban-what-happens-next
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035467999/justice-department-sues-texas-over-new-abortion-ban
