Thread by @WordWeaverFree

Can we clear some science up so we can discuss reproductive rights from an informed stance? THREAD:

1) Embryos are not unborn babies. They are the unformed *potential* of a baby. An embryo exists between the 2nd week and 11th week after fertilization. Most miscarriages happen during this time period because the embryo has not formed properly.

Many times, women who aren’t trying to get pregnant don’t even realize they’re miscarrying—they think it’s a heavy period that was a few weeks late, and when the embryo is expelled it resembles a blood clot.

2) Only a woman actively tracking her fertility and cycle would even be aware that an embryo exists before the 4th week after fertilization. This is because the first missed period would be week 2 or 3 after fertilization.

But because women’s bodies aren’t like clockwork, she’d wait a week or so to test. It’s like waiting for a bus: You expect it at a certain time. When it doesn’t arrive on the dot, you don’t just leave the bus stop—you wait a bit longer before deciding the bus isn’t coming.

3) OBGYNs track due dates based NOT on day 0 of fertilization, but the 1st day of a woman’s last period—**when the fertilized egg/embryo didn’t even exist**.

So let’s say your last period was March 15th...lasted until March 30th (5 days), and you had sex on April 5th (20 days after 1st day of last period). You miss your period April 12th (28 days), but because you aren’t keeping a calendar, you don’t notice it’s late until April 20.

You give it another week & take a pregnancy test on April 27th, and it’s positive. By then your embryo has only developed for 28 days, (since April 5th), but your OBGYN will consider you 6 weeks pregnant.

They call this “gestational age.” Which means laws banning abortions as early as 6 weeks gestational age are in fact banning the abortion of 4 week old embryos.

4) OBGYNs are trained in treating maternal health, not embryonic/fetal health. In fact, maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) as a discipline didn’t exist before the 1960’s.

MFM drs can only detect and treat complications once an embryo becomes a fetus—once its organs have formed and are reasonably functioning. This is typically around 12 weeks gestational age- 10
weeks development...way after “heartbeat” laws go into effect.

5) In vertebrates, the heart is the first organ to begin develop, and in humans begins to pulsate and pump blood around day 20-22 after fertilization: approximately 3 weeks of embryonic development and 5 weeks gestational age.

See #3: in our scenario, a “heartbeat” can be present just as a woman is discovering she’s pregnant.

6) A heartbeat does not mean the embryo is “alive.” In fact, the pulse of the first heartbeats take place in a tubular structure resembling a blood vessel that isn’t even a fully formed heart yet. It functions very differently than what we know as the pumping of a human heart.

The tubular heart is the mechanism that delivers the rest of the materials needed to form organs. There is no brain before a heartbeat. No stomach. No lungs. No limbs. The rest of the embryo develops around the heart, which is feeding blood and nutrients to the other organ cells.

In fact, it’s reasonable to say that at during this phase, a human embryo *is* a heart and in indistinguishable from other vertebrates.

All of these facts mean one thing: the ultra-restrictive abortion laws coming out of 14 states now are incompatible with the science of human development. They are based on *belief*, not fact. When you legislate belief over fact, you are imposing state religion.

Under His Eye.

One more thing: my apologies to the trans and nbp community for failing to recognize that women aren’t the only ones with uteruses or periods. And thank you to those of you who reminded me to be more inclusive in future posts.