Florida’s Texas-style abortion bill is based on murky science. Is anyone surprised? | Editorial

To no one’s surprise, a Florida lawmaker was quick to jump on the anti-abortion bandwagon after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to go into effect.

To no one’s surprise, he filed a cruel bill that would ban abortions as early as about six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant.

And to no one’s surprise, just like the Texas law, the Florida proposal would all but turn private citizens into bounty hunters. Enticed by a financial payoff, they would be allowed to sue people who provide an abortion or anyone who “aids or abets” or pays for a woman to get an abortion.

Here’s the icing on the cake: Those people could be sued “regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed” in violation of the law, the bill states. Defendants who lose in court would pay at least $10,000 per abortion, plus attorney fees, to the plaintiffs, who would have up to six years after an abortion is performed to file the action.

Misleading term

Contrary to its supporters’ assertion, the “Florida Heartbeat Act” is not entirely based on science. No surprise there, either.

House Bill 167 would ban an abortion “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat,” or around six weeks of gestation. The bill takes a page out of the Texas bill, defining heartbeat as “cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac.”

The term “fetal heartbeat” sounds very clinical and scientific — and conservatives have long said that technological advances have allowed doctors to detect fetal heart activity sooner than in the past. The problem is, many doctors say the term is misleading.

In general terms, a “heartbeat” is defined by the closing and opening of cardiac valves. At six weeks of gestation, an embryo is not yet considered a fetus, and the heart hasn’t been formed — that happens between the ninth and 12th weeks of pregnancy, the Associated Press reported. The “heartbeat” that gets detected in the early stages of a pregnancy is actually electrical activity within the cells of an embryo. That’s why many doctors believe “fetal heartbeat” laws spread misinformation.

“The flickering that we’re seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine,” Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who specializes in abortion care, told NPR earlier this month.

The term “heartbeat” tugs at people’s heartstrings and is easier to market than “electrical activity.” It evokes the image of a baby in the womb and is designed to make people believe that women who get abortions are committing murder. That emotional manipulation is evident in HB 167’s attempt to replace every reference to a “fetus” in Florida’s proposal with the term “unborn child.” The Herald Editorial Board left a voicemail seeking comment at the district office of sponsor Rep. Webster Barnaby, R-Deltona. He told Capitol reporters last week he had “no comments at this time.”

Pro-choice ally gone

Republican leaders in Tallahassee vowed to pass legislation to restrict abortions after the Texas law was allowed to stand, but it’s unclear whether HB 167 will be it. Senate President Wilton Simpson said this month that lawmakers were working on a bill, but one hasn’t been filed in the Senate, which is usually more moderate than the ultra-conservative House.

Simpson has cleared the way for such a bill by removing Democratic Sen. Lauren Book, an abortion-rights advocate from Broward County, as chair of a key committee that would have to hear the legislation. Whether that was a strategic move by Simpson is unclear, but it’s easy to put two and two together. Simpson said Book’s new position as the Senate minority leader precludes her from chairing the committee, but the result is that Tallahassee’s most powerful ally for women’s reproductive rights has been neutered. Book was replaced with Miami Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia, who has an anti-abortion record.

That means that whatever comes out of the Legislature in next year’s lawmaking session will be bad. And if it follows the trend we see in Florida nowadays — from the hiring of a state surgeon general who believes highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are “nothing special” to the governor doubting the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of the virus — it will be justified as scientifically based.

But we know better.

This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 6:00 AM.