A South Carolina woman is suing over the state’s “heartbeat law” with the backing of Planned Parenthood.
Taylor Shelton filed a lawsuit in which she seeks supposed “clarification” over when the state’s pro-life law applies, arguing that the language is ambiguous.
According to FOX Carolina, Shelton said she knew she was pregnant two days after her missed period, and by her own recounting, should have been legally able to get an abortion. “I found out that I was pregnant at four weeks with an IUD in place, and knew immediately that an abortion was the right decision for me,” Shelton said. “Although I was well under the six-week mark, I was unable to access the care I needed in the state of South Carolina, and this unwarranted hardship made me feel unbelievably frustrated and terribly confused.”
Shelton did not clarify why she was unable to get an abortion, despite being — as she said — “well under” the six week mark. The lawsuit merely states that she couldn’t get an appointment in South Carolina:
Despite recognizing her pregnancy very early, and making her decision very soon after, Ms. Shelton was unable to get an appointment with one of South Carolina’s abortion providers before her pregnancy would have progressed to six weeks LMP.
Instead, Ms. Shelton made three trips to North Carolina, spending roughly twenty hours driving in total. North Carolina imposes a seventy-two-hour waiting period on patients seeking abortion[45] and requires at least two health center visits.[46] Ms. Shelton was first misled by an anti-abortion center in Charlotte (a four hour drive), where she thought she could get an ultrasound for her first visit. She next was able to complete her first visit and get an ultrasound at a PPSAT health center in Chapel Hill (another four hour drive) a week later. Ms. Shelton was then able to obtain an aspiration abortion at PPSAT’s Wilmington health center (a two hour drive) on September 23, at which point she was roughly six weeks and four days pregnant.
By the time she obtained an abortion, Ms. Shelton was more than six weeks pregnant, roughly the point at which a so-called “fetal heartbeat” can be detected. Ms. Shelton used contraceptives and early pregnancy testing but was still unable to get an abortion before six weeks LMP.
By this explanation, it doesn’t seem that the state’s “heartbeat law” played a role whatsoever in Shelton’s inability to get an abortion, but that instead, the problem was a lack of availability with local abortion facilities.
Joining Shelton in the lawsuit are Planned Parenthood South Atlantic (PPSAT) and Katherine Farris, an abortionist and PPSAT’s chief medical officer. As the lawsuit noted, both already sued South Carolina challenging the heartbeat law’s constitutionality, but failed. They also tried to argue that “medical consensus” states that a preborn child’s heart is “formed” at nine weeks gestation, and not six weeks. “PPSAT and Dr. Farris previously assumed that the term ‘fetal heartbeat’ included not just a ‘heartbeat’ once a heart has formed, but also embryonic electrical activity present before development of the cardiovascular system,” the lawsuit said.
Of course, detecting the heartbeat of an embryo — a clear sign of life — was uncontroversial until states began passing protections for preborn children with detectable heartbeats, or “cardiac activity.” As most are aware, the term “cardiac” refers to the heart.
This is noteworthy, as the abortion industry can now no longer seem to make up its mind about when, exactly, the preborn heart begins beating. The pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recently changed its tune, claiming that a heartbeat is “complex” and that “[u]ntil the chambers of the heart have been developed and can be detected via ultrasound (roughly 17-20 weeks of gestation), it is not accurate to characterize the embryo’s or fetus’s cardiac development as a heartbeat.”
Planned Parenthood itself previously acknowledged on its own website that a preborn child’s heart begins beating at approximately six weeks gestation, before erasing it.
The common pro-abortion claim now is that what is heard in the first trimester is nothing more than meaningless electrical impulses (“cardiac activity”), or that it is some sort of manufactured sound that, evidently, all OB/GYNs across the world play in an attempt to manipulate women.
Scientific reality, however, is quite clear. By six weeks gestation, there is an embryonic heartbeat present. It is true that the heart, at this stage of pregnancy has only two chambers, and therefore, is not yet fully developed into the four chambers it will eventually have. However, the heart is pumping blood throughout the body, a crucial part of fetal development and not just meaningless spasms of muscle tissue. Circulating blood throughtout the preborn child’s body gives oxygen and nutrients needed to grow.
A statement from Shelton and Planned Parenthood seems to indicate the true intention behind this lawsuit: Planned Parenthood needed another woman to claim she had been “injured” by the law so they could try, yet again, to have it overturned.
“The entire experience left me angry and quite frankly, traumatized,” Shelton said. “I want everyone to understand the impact South Carolina’s abortion restrictions and unfair treatment are having on real people, and I hope my story shows how punitive and cruel these abortion bans actually are.”
