When considering who or what is a human person, the possession of a beating heart might seem like a reasonable requirement. The fetus has no feet with which to kick. She may have no idea that she is pregnant. At 6 weeks gestation, a woman would feel nothing within her abdomen.
This early heart is not ready to support circulation of blood and is more a demonstration of how heart cells contract in the same way an individual heart cell taken from an adult heart would contract if observed under a microscope. A fetus at 6 weeks is a little more than ½ an inch long making the heart about the size of a single grain of rice.
At 13 weeks of gestation, the fetus is tiny and if removed from the mother's uterus, it would quickly die, even with the best medical care. All of the human body parts are actually completed by the end of the first trimester and the rest of the pregnancy is about growth. We divide fetal development into three even sections or trimesters. The common notion of pregnancy being 9 months is a close enough approximation. It takes 40 weeks of pregnancy on average to make a human ready for delivery. This so called "fetal heartbeat bill" claims personhood to a human fetus at a point where the heartbeat can be detected, sometimes as early as 6 weeks after conception. Georgia's legislation would essentially ban abortions as a consequence of HB 481, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act. Governor Brian Kemp of the State of Georgia has until May 12 to sign or veto the same sort of bill. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine just signed a fetal heartbeat bill that will essentially ban abortions past 6 weeks gestation. On the other side, the product of conception is regarded as nothing of consequence, as if to say the biological origins of human life are not even worthy of our consideration. Unfortunately, on the one side, abortion discourse draws freely from mystical explanations or inconsistent faith claims about life and personhood. In the abortion debate, science has been dragged unwillingly to prop up unscientific claims, or worse, weaponized as a quasi-legal bludgeon in the form of an unnecessary vaginal ultrasound, a prerequisite in some states for those seeking abortion. These days in America, middle positions are unpopular, and abortion has pushed itself once again into the public consciousness. Divisive issues like abortion divide us along ideological lines so wide that the middle ground is obliterated.
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