Some time in the course of yesterday, the editors at The Atlantic magazine opened a pre-med textbook, read one of the hundreds of texts they got from doctors, or just sat quietly on a couch and pondered the question: Does a fetus have a heart?
Now, to you, that sounds like a really stupid question. Fetuses grow into babies which grow in to (wait for it) editors at The Atlantic (if they’re profoundly unlucky), so, yes, duh, they have hearts so, ergo, they have heartbeats. But these editors were stuck in an ontological argument only Samuel Beckett would have conceived and they actually posted a story in their latest mag that fetal heartbeats seen in ultrasound at six weeks are “imaginary.”
“It is dubious to call this movement a ‘heartbeat’; there is no heart to speak of [at six weeks],” the 2,500-word article said.
The error-filled article, written by Moira Weigel, a doctoral candidate at Yale (like, medical doctor? Nuh-uh. In comparative literature, which, as everyone at Yale knows, makes her an expert in everything), turned out to be woefully wrong.
The mag needled up the headline to read “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person.” That oughta’ show those non-Ivy League morons who think life begins at conception. Weigel, pondering the very building blocks of Life, wrote: “What is a fetal heartbeat? And why does it matter?…. [Fetal heartbeat measures] are based on two assumptions: First, that an ultrasound image has an obvious meaning. Second, that any pregnant woman who sees an ultrasound will recognize this meaning. Science does not bear either assumption out.”
Except, it does. And unlike climate change, the facts about fetal heart development are accepted by all.
Here’s what the Mayo Clinic writes about Week 5 of a pregnancy (which is actually four weeks after conception): “Growth is rapid this week. Just four weeks after conception, the neural tube along your baby’s back is closing and your baby’s heart is pumping blood.”
The Mayo Clinic. Enough said. So the editors rewrote the headline: “How Ultrasounds Became Political: The technology has been used to create sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.” OK, a lot more wordy, but more accurate. Oh, and they also deleted all that stuff about the fetal heartbeat being “imaginary.”
And in a shocking turn, they admitted they were wrong, way wrong. In a correction now attached to the story, they wrote: “This article originally stated that there is ‘no heart to speak of’ in a six-week-old fetus. By that point in a pregnancy, a heart has already begun to form. We regret the error.”
The article also incorrectly said John Kasich is governor of Indiana (which would be a shock to the millions of Ohio residents who voted for him). Editors fixed that, too. Maybe next time they’ll take the time to actually read the story before they send it to press.