Heartbeat
Blog Series #7 Modern Science a.k.a. COMMON SENSE, part 1a
I am taking a little break from my sixth series of blogs to leap into this seventh series. I’ve had a lot of these themes on my mind lately. I hope to explore some of these COMMON SENSE themes, then return to series #6 How Jesus Treats Women because, well I really do enjoy that series, and there remains some excellent material to explore there as well.
Modern politicians at the time of this writing September 28, 2024 — particularly the ‘maga* republican’ and ‘evangelical christian’ variety — seem to have no concept of the female reproductive system or any modern scientific knowledge about the fetus during pregnancy. Yet, these religious and political leaders arbitrarily create legislation that affects women’s reproductive rights; legislation that benefits THEM to the detriment of individual women of child-bearing age.
The lucrative benefits of
political Power
social Influence/prestige and
material Wealth
are just too enticing. Much like the Jewish Pharisees of Jesus’s day, these modern religious leaders (shaped like maga* politicians or evangelists ruling over their mega*church empires) will throw a pregnant woman under a bus if it will enable them to maintain their desperate strangle-hold on Power, Influence, and Wealth.
The way these politicians have deliberately mis-interpreted the ‘fetal heartbeat’ detectable by modern ultrasound is a prime example of this greed. Politicians and religious leaders make the false connection between an ultrasound heartbeat and signs of ‘life.’ Currently, there are four states in the U.S. that permit abortion up to the sixth week of gestation, but ban abortion after that point because what appears to be a fetal heart beat can be detected with an ultrasound examination at about the sixth week of pregnancy. Politicians assume that a heartbeat indicates ‘life’ and to terminate a fetus’ existence would therefore be murder. Many women do not even know they are pregnant in that first month.
YES this ultrasound heart activity indicates a potential for a hypothetical, un-realized future life, but not the definition of ‘alive’ in realtime as we find it in both the Bible and modern Medical Science (see my blog titled ‘Breath’ for these definitions) — and certainly not the type of ‘alive’ that can be murdered.
When any mammalian fetus transitions to an infant at birth, all of its bodily systems have to be functioning independently for it to survive outside the womb. This means the cardiac, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems (to name a few) have to be functioning on their own, without external support, for any mammal to be considered ‘alive.’ This matches the Biblical definition of ‘alive’ for humans in Genesis 2:7 when Adam began to breathe air through nostrils signifying that all of his bodily systems were functioning together independently as well as inter-dependently.
According to Medical News Today, the human heart has not completely formed at 6 weeks’ gestation to be able to function independently. So the concept of developing secular laws based on a fetal ‘heartbeat’ detectable at 6 weeks’ gestation is a fallacy. After it is fully formed at 10 weeks’ gestation (see the helpful time table in the Medical News Today article linked above), here is how the fetal heart works during pregnancy:
“Because the placenta does the work of exchanging oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) through the mother's circulation, the fetal lungs are not used for breathing. Instead of blood flowing to the lungs to pick up oxygen and then flowing to the rest of the body, the fetal circulation shunts (bypasses) most of the blood away from the lungs. In the fetus, blood is shunted from the pulmonary artery to the aorta through a linked blood vessel called the ductus arteriosus.
At Birth
With the first breaths of air the baby takes at birth, the fetal circulation changes. A larger amount of blood is sent to the lungs to pick up oxygen.”
— Cincinnati Children’s article on ‘Fetal Circulation’
The fetal heart does not develop fully until week 10 of gestation. According to this Cincinnati Children’s article, the heart does not function inter-dependently with the developing respiratory system (the very definition of ‘alive’) until birth. So what is causing the ultrasound ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks’ gestation that leads politicians to claim the fetus is ‘alive’ that early?
Join me in my next post ‘Heartbeat, Electricity and Medulla Oblongata’ to find out more.
[*I use ‘maga’ to represent the current use of the slogan ‘make america great again’ by the U.S. far-right conservative political party. However, the word ‘mega’ is a synonym for ‘huge.’ Within the context of church attendance, a ‘mega church’ typically boasts more than 1,000 members. While these words are usually pronounced the same, they are spelled differently and have very different meanings. The first is used to describe a secular political aspiration/ideology, and the second to describe a religious setting.]