And what is a "fetal heartbeat"?The order from Judge Maya Guerra Gamble halts the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life and its associates from suing abortion providers and workers at Planned Parenthood clinics under Texas’s highly restrictive new abortion law, S.B. 8.
“The Court finds that S.B. 8 creates a probable, irreparable, and imminent injury in the interim for which plaintiffs and their physicians, staff and patients throughout Texas have no adequate remedy at law if plaintiffs, their physicians, and staff are subjected to private enforcement lawsuits against them under S.B. 8,” Gamble wrote.
The ruling applies only to the parties in the lawsuit and does not invalidate the new law, which prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur as early as six weeks after a woman becomes pregnant.
from https://www.livescience.com/65501-fetal ... ained.html
it's audible when an ultrasound is performed, according to the articleBut what exactly do we mean when we talk about a "fetal heartbeat" at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case.
Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect "a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby," said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future "pacemaker" of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.
But the heart is far from fully formed at this stage, and the "beat" isn't audible; if doctors put a stethoscope up to a woman's belly this early on in her pregnancy, they would not hear a heartbeat, Aftab told Live Science. (What's more, it isn't until the eighth week of pregnancy that the baby is called a fetus; prior to that, it's still considered an embryo, according to the Cleveland Clinic.)
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