12. Women compelled to be shown sonograms by the doctor performing the abortion since 2012 within twenty-four hours of the procedure accompanied by an audible recording of the embryo’s cardiac activity, found the clinical relation to their doctor a way to furnish a legal record of abetting criminal activity and a public form of shaming. The “heartbeat” was not created by an actual closure of tricuspid valves, or a beat identical to the cardiovascular pulse of an extra-uterine environment, or either a basis for viability or as synchronized with breath. But it adopted how ultrasounds have become standard ways of screening embryonic abnormalities of cardiac development during the formation of valves of cardiac chambers and the parasympathetic neural network as ways of encouraging pregnant women to look within their souls akin to a confessional chamber, outside the diagnostic relation to an OB/GYN, or a clinical or hospital setting.
The alleged “heartbeat” that pregnant mothers are compelled to listen in clinics parallels formation of vascular muscles and conductive cells, but it seems a stretch to posit a “heart” or “beat” before the existence of coronary vessels, or cardiac chambers that are connected to the aorta and pulmonary trunk. Yet the mandated encounter with this sonographic registration has changed the clinical setting to a prescriptive encounter that erases any agency or identity of the pregnant woman.
By framing the clinical encounter in ways that serve a legal strategy based on the determination of embryonic cardiac activity–termed a “heartbeat” to invest the embryo with legal personhood–to cast abortions performed beyond six weeks as medical malpractice, and grounds for determining legal personhood or agency in order to establish its criminality against a public good.
At this early stage in pregnancy, the almost visual illusion of the “heartbeat” located in the embryo without any set chambers in the fetal pole that suggests the viability of the pregnancy, but any motion in the forming organ is entirely transmitted from maternal blood flow, her heart beat and her respiration, as much as grounds to invest personhood in the embryo. The visual illusion however tugs on heartstrings to reduce pregnant women’s right to terminate pregnancy or seek an abortion. The reduced threshold of access to abortion compromises privacy, effectively converting the ultrasound developed for maternal health to a mandated event to procure to legal evidence of a crime that would not be admissible in court, focussing on the fetus as a living being by obscuring that the pole or embryo lacks viability outside the mother’s body–and that its cardiac activity is likely triggered only by the mother’s own. The glee with which Gov. Abbott tweeted his pleasure at the passage of the law was a publicity stunt, however, appealing to his supporters as a protection of freedoms–not a dramatic curtailing of public health–and adopting a particularly viscous policy of placing undue burdens on women, by dressing the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Musings on Maps 