The misleading echo of a heartbeat

While talking about life on Instagram, essayist Gideon Jacobs wrote “images, even in the age of Photoshop, are truthy. I saw more than one reader on social media respond sincerely that they found the images baffling because at six weeks of pregnancy they had heard a heartbeat when they went for their first ultrasound. At six weeks of gestation, those valves don’t exist…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.” In the vicious war against reproductive rights in the US, pro-abortion activists have had to work hard to make this explanation known. In India, where the Supreme Court has recently weighed in to say that all women, regardless of marital status, have the right to abortion up to 24 weeks, the “heartbeat” is only one of a million factors that affect a woman’s decision. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag once wrote, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.” One could say the same about laws, so I, for one, am ready to get whatever legal toffees I get anytime.