@heartbeat

A six-week abortion ban or early abortion ban, called a "heartbeat bill" or "fetal heartbeat bill" by proponents, is a form of abortion restriction legislation in the United States. These bans make abortion îllégâl as early as six weeks gestational age (two or three weeks into a *******cy), which is when proponents claim that a "fetal heartbeat" can be detected.
Medical and reproductive health experts, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, say that the reference to a fetal heartbeat is medically inaccurate and intentionally misleading because a conceptus is not called a fetus until after ten weeks of *******cy, before which the proper term is an embryo, as well as that at six weeks the embryo has no heart, which at that stage is only a group of cells which will become a heart. Medical professionals advise that a true fetal heartbeat cannot be detected until around 17 to 20 weeks of gestation when the chambers of the heart have become sufficiently developed.Janet Porter, an anti-abortion activist from Ohio, is considered to be the person that first authored this type of legislation. Efforts to introduce her model law succeeded in passing through political branches of government in about a dozen states, but in most cases the courts struck down or blocked similar legislation. However, the Texas law and analogues subsequently adopted in other states succeeded due to a unique enforcement mechanism that makes challenging the law extremely difficult, and which was upheld by the Supreme Court. In some states, the heartbeat bills' effect (whether blocked or not) has been minimized by more stringent total abortion bans that were announced following the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization; in other states, such as Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee, judges lifted the injunctions against the previously passed laws.
Anti-abortion groups argue that heartbeat "is the universally recognized indicator of life" and as such must be protected. Reproductive rights advocates, on the other hand, say that these bans are de facto complete abortion bans, since many women do not even know that they are *******t six weeks after their last menstruation, which is four weeks post-fertilization.: 1 

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