Not Really A Heartbeat, Clump Of Cells, Property Not People — It’s The Same Old Lie

Georgia gubernatorial candidate and election denier Stacey Abrams used an event earlier this week to spread her denial of scientific reality, claiming that babies who have been in the womb for six weeks don’t have a heartbeat, and that the pulse millions of parents rejoice to hear on their childrens’ ultrasounds is actually “a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.” (Note: Even Planned Parenthood admitted a six-week-old unborn baby possessed a “basic beating heart” until the abortion provider scrubbed the line from its website to comply with Abrams’ rhetoric.)

In recent years and culminating in response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, abortion proponents have been more willing to admit that a child in his mother’s womb is still a child, and to advocate for the right to kill him anyway. A worldview that places self-gratification above all moral responsibilities to others can convince its adherents that even child sacrifice is justifiable in service to the idol of self. But maybe Democrats realized that’s not a popular way to win elections because they’re crawling back to the bogus claim that unborn babies aren’t real people.

Where have we heard that bad-faith argument before?

A few years ago, the common talking point was that “it’s just a clump of cells.” While some still try to make that argument, the more women see their babies’ faces, hands and feet, and movements on ultrasound screens — and the more horrific footage emerges of recognizable baby body parts being ripped apart in abortions — the less people buy the argument that unborn babies are static blobs of lifeless matter. It’s also a hard argument for Democrats to make when they support abortion up to the point of birth; you might convince an ignorant person that a baby in the first few weeks of gestation is “just a clump of cells,” but that’s a hard sell about a baby at 38 weeks (or 24, or 15).

At 15 weeks — the gestational age at which a Republican bill currently proposed in the Senate would ban abortions, earning Democrat panic — babies can feel pain, their hearts are “pumping approximately 26 quarts of blood daily,” their skeletons and organs are formed, they can start moving their limbs, and they can taste and hear. Even the pro-abortion corporate media were fawning just Thursday over a study showing that babies in the womb made different facial expressions in reaction to what their mothers ate.

In blatant denial of scientific reality, these arguments used to deny the personhood of unborn babies have another predecessor: the bogus claims that Africans weren’t fully “human” made in an attempt to justify enslaving them.

Proponents of slavery often claimed their slaves were property instead of people, denying their humanity to justify the denial of their rights. In his infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included” in the phrase “all men are created equal,” reflecting the argument that if slaves did not have full personhood, then their lives and rights could be trampled. Slaveowners appealed to hack “science” suggesting that slaves felt pain less or had smaller brains, much like abortion proponents claim unborn babies “don’t really have heartbeats.”

The denial of African slaves’ humanity was a “vicious, obvious lie meant to justify and rationalize horrific violence against human beings whose God-given rights interfere with the conveniences and lifestyles of the ruling regime,” as The Federalist’s Sean Davis put it, a description that exactly describes modern Democrats’ anti-science denial of the unborn’s humanity.

It’s the same old lie. The party that pretends to “represent science” is once again spouting flat-earther claims to excuse taking others’ lives for political and financial profit. And it’s just as evil and wildly untrue as it was before.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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