In a desperate attempt to convince their idiotic readership that the fetus in early pregnancy is just a clump of tissue, the Guardian has published an article involving a series of images, provided by a pro-abortion group, of “pregnancy tissue” in a petri dish. They do this while also dating the ’tissue’ therein from the last menstrual period (LMP) rather than by the date of fertilization, usually two weeks later.
The article and the site play on a number of pro-abort tropes. Firstly, the one above, that the fetus even at this early stage is simply ‘pregnancy tissue’ and not a unified whole that is in the early stages of development. Secondly, it employs the trope that because the fetus is not visibly human it is not human, either because it is too small for the human eye unaided to see human features, or because these features are the marks of humanness and their absence speaks against the humanness of the fetus at this stage of development.
Each of these tropes are involved in their curious claim re fetal heartbeat. Here is the question and answer provided on the website the Guardian article relies on:
Does this tissue have a “heartbeat”?
There is no “heart” at 6 weeks of pregnancy, but there are cells that will come together to form the heart, and those cells already “beat.” This is the motion that is seen on ultrasound and that people refer to as a “heartbeat,” but again there is not yet a formed heart.
Notice the curious claim here. There is no heart here yet, only cells acting in concert, ‘beating’, but this unified action by a selection of cells within the ‘pregnancy tissue’, identified by an ultrasound, is not yet a formed heart. You would have to be in the grip of an ideological stupor to believe their attempt to explain away this ‘heartbeat’.
Here is an image of the fetus at nine weeks LMP, once removed from its mother’s womb:
Here is a video of the fetus in utero at 10 weeks LMP:
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what is going on here.
Addendum: here is the heart 33 days postfertilization visualized by scanning electron microscope
Right/left atria (RA/LA), right/left ventricles (RV/LV), atrioventricular canal (AVC), & outflow tract (OFT).
