Analysis

According to these doctors and scientists, the heart has ‘a nice flow of blood already’ at 23 days

7 month fetus, late abortion, 28 weeks, heart

A recent Twitter thread by @BeccCobain includes a series of videos created by doctors and scientists who explain the development of the human heart at the early stages of pregnancy, showing that it “must be able to pump blood starting at the 3rd week of development (5 weeks LMP).” Each video supports the notion that pro-life heartbeat laws are completely based on science. Despite noise from the abortion industry that embryos don’t have heart “beats” but rather, “pulses,” the truth is that the heart is the very first organ to form because it is the organ that allows the embryo to grow and develop.

“When the heart is in the form of a tube, even then … it is pumping blood”

Dr. Mobeen Syed notes in his video that heart formation from the “third week to fifth week is really important.” He states:

[The] heart is the very first organ that starts developing and it is the first organ that reaches a functional state. Can you imagine that the heart reaches a functional state even before its own development completes? When the heart is in the form of a tube, even then it is pulsating and it is beating and it is pumping blood.

The reason for that is that until the second week of the development, the embryo can receive the oxygenation and nutrition through diffusion and it can rid of the waste products in the same process. However, after the second week of development, [it] is big enough that the embryo cannot now just survive using the diffusion mechanism. So it does need some sort of a vascular system and it does need some sort of circulation and so [the] heart has to be developed.

The heart must be “developed” before any of the other organ systems can develop. At 22 days, the embryo has a beating heart. If it didn’t, the embryo would not be alive.

READ: ’98 beats per minute’: Science sheds light on the heartbeat of the preborn child

“A nice flow of blood already” at 23 days

Peter J. Ward, Professor of Anatomy used Play-Doh in his video to show how the heart develops.

The heart, to do its job, has to be able to pump, and it starts pumping fairly early on — about day 23 of development. And it does that because a layer of myocardium [heart muscle], which I’m showing here with purple Play-doh, develops on the outside or external to the cardiac jelly. […] At this point, we’ve got a nice flow of blood already set up through the heart.

The embryonic veins, common cardinal veins, umbilical veins, vitellin veins, all bring blood to the heart […] blood goes out through the left and right aortic arches to reach the left and right dorsal aortae which then fuse into a single dorsal aorta which supplies blood throughout the embryo and then back to the placenta. If you’re human, you’ve got a placenta hanging out there.

“The heart starts beating about 22 days into development”

Ward also discusses why the embryo must have a functioning heart at 22 days (five weeks LMP). “[It] starts beating about 22 days into development. This is important because at this point, the embryo can’t get much larger without a heart. […] We need to have a circulatory system and the heart starts pumping at 22 days because we absolutely have to have it in order to get any larger.” Ward clearly states that actually blood is being pumped at just 22 days after fertilization.

“The cardiovascular system is the very first organ system to reach maturity”

Dr. Regina Lantin-Hermosa states that “in order for the embryo to develop into a fetus, circulation must replace diffusion.” She explains, “And for this reason — if there is no circulation, then the rest of the organ systems are not going to develop and therefore the cardiovascular system is the very first organ system to reach maturity. Cardiac development begins very early … at about 15 to 18 days post-conception. Sometimes women are not even aware that they are pregnant at this point in time and that puts their fetuses at risk [… for outside complications] that can affect the developing heart.”

“The tube starts beating”

Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and Roddenberry Stem Cell Center at Gladstone and professor at the University of California at San Fransisco experiments on the tissue and organs of aborted children. Yet, he himself knows that these babies have beating hearts just three weeks after fertilization.

“We know that as early as two weeks after fertilization in a human embryo, there are cells […] that begin to align themselves in this crescent shape. And already at this stage before there are any organs in the body, these cells already know that they are going to become heart muscle in the future.”

He points to the heart tube that forms at about three weeks post-fertilization and explains that this tube “starts beating” at about 21 days.

It is clear that no matter how much the abortion industry tries to deny the humanity of preborn children, human embryos are human beings who are very much alive. Their hearts are already beating and pumping blood before most women even know they are pregnant.

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