The left has been actively targeting language for some time now, insidiously altering the meaning of words to advance their cause or support their narratives. Now, we're seeing an attempt to discredit the very meaning of one keyword to states passing anti-abortion laws, such as in Texas: heartbeat.
The New York Times, on Valentine's Day no less, published a more than 1,700-word piece titled "Abortion Opponents Hear a 'Heartbeat.' Most Experts Hear Something Else."
It's not really a heartbeat, you see, but "a primitive tube of cardiac cells that emit electric pulses and pump blood."
The focus of the author's discussion is around Texas's law, which bars abortion from the time a heartbeat is detected, around six weeks.
"[W]hat the law defines as the sound of a heartbeat is not considered by medical experts to be coming from a developed heart, which forms later in pregnancy," writes author Roni Caryn Rabin.
"If all goes well, four chambers and valves will form by the ninth or 10th week of pregnancy, and the heart will continue developing throughout gestation. But a heartbeat's familiar 'lub-dub, lub-dub' sound is created by the closing of the heart's valves, which do not exist in the six-week-old cardiac tube."
She then states that the sound parents so eagerly hope to hear at the early stages of pregnancy isn't actually a heartbeat, but noise "created by the machine itself, which translates the waves of electrical activity into something audible."
Someone should let her know about ultrasounds.
This objection is quite odd. Yes, the Doppler heartbeat is the result of using high pitched sound waves to track blood flow and produce a sound you can hear.
— Leah Libresco Sargeant (@LeahLibresco) February 14, 2022
By the same logic, an ultrasound picture isn’t “real” because it translates sound waves into a visual representation pic.twitter.com/f66x3yMTzZ
??.@nytimes claims that a 6-week-old unborn baby doesn't actually have a heart, but admits these babies have "cardiac cells that... pump blood." A refresher course in logic might be in order, but we'll stick to the #science https://t.co/UTikgdcjRs
— Charlotte Lozier Institute (@LozierInstitute) February 14, 2022
If @nytimes needs 1,800 words to say that a baby's developing organ which *pumps blood* is not actually a heart ... then the pro-life movement is winning. CLI presents #ScienceForLife while New York Times does almost comical gyrations around logic. https://t.co/UTikgcUIsS
— Charlotte Lozier Institute (@LozierInstitute) February 15, 2022
Just gonna leave this here pic.twitter.com/cwF4QQ3a8d
— Liam (@LiamDan008) February 14, 2022