A beating heart is neither a necessary nor sufficient standard to determine the start of life, making antiabortion heartbeat bills morally and legally wrong. | Perspective
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion with its Roe v. Wade decision. Seven months ago, the Court took those rights away. Since the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, antiabortion legislators have pushed state-level laws that try to ban abortions at earlier and earlier points in pregnancy. With some of these laws, legislators want to make abortion illegal as soon as an embryo has detectable cardiac activity.
Heartbeat bills are based on the work of an antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ, 2020-election-denier activist named Janet Porter, who has been named the “godmother” or “crusader” of the heartbeat movement. Those behind this movement believe that life begins at the onset of cardiac activity. The group Faith2Action first introduced this antiabortion legislation in 2011 in Ohio, sending heart-shaped balloons to lawmakers and bringing pregnant women to have the fetus “testify” via ultrasound exam.
But this doesn’t matter to antiabortion legislators, who place more value on the outcome of a pregnancy than the person experiencing it. Speaking about the heartbeat bill he authored, Texas state senator Bryan Hughes has said, “The heartbeat is the universal sign of life.” The legislative director of the group Texas Right To Life has argued that “the heartbeat is a morally significant biological moment where we can detect whether someone is alive or not.” These statements are wrong.
To illustrate that a heartbeat is not a sufficient criterion to completely determine legal or moral status, consider examples in which a human has a heartbeat, but their moral status is compromised or nonexistent. Strict criteria exist for declaring brain death, and lack of a heartbeat is not among them. Thus, once a person is declared brain-dead, they do not retain the same moral and legal status as other people, despite having a heartbeat.
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