One of the nation’s largest providers of abortion altered its webpage on pregnancy after the Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate claimed that a fetus doesn’t have a heartbeat at six weeks.
“There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,” Stacey Abrams, the Democrat, said during a Sept. 21 event in Atlanta while speaking against abortion restrictions. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”
A number of people responded online by pointing to the website of Planned Parenthood, which advocates for and performs abortions across the country.
“What happens during week 5–6?” the Planned Parenthood webpage on early pregnancy stated. “A very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop.”
The page was altered after Abrams made her remarks, according to archived versions of the page.
It now states: “A part of the embryo starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it’s not a fully-formed heart—it’s the earliest stage of the heart developing.”
Planned Parenthood didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is running for reelection, signed a six-week abortion ban, known as the fetal heartbeat law, in 2019. The law took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. The law says that “any natural person, including an unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat, shall be included in population-based determinations” and that a detectable human heartbeat means “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac.”
Abrams’s campaign website states that she would veto any legislation “that would further restrict abortion rights” and that she'd try to repeal the abortion ban if she were elected.
“This can be seen by vaginal ultrasound,” the library states.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an obstetrics and gynecology doctor, said that Abrams’s claim is wrong.
“Babies have a real heartbeat at six weeks. Why do radical Dems hate unborn babies?” he wrote on Twitter.
“Let me be clear: Babies DO have a heartbeat at 6 weeks,” Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood worker, said on Twitter. “Stop looking for ways to attempt to deny their humanity.”
