Why Do Politicians Tell Such Bald-Face Lies?

            The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the necessity of honesty and respect in democracies. Voters deserve to know the truth, so they can make informed choices. When candidates tell lies, uninformed voters may accept the lies as truth – even bald-faced lies like the one that Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told at a student forum in Atlanta this week.

            Abrams is not a doctor, and she made extraordinary claims when she responded to a question about how she would protect abortion rights if she were elected governor. This is her response according to Chris Pandolfo at The Blaze: 

There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks….

It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have a right to take control of a woman’s body. [She called fetal heart beats “medically false” and “biologically a lie.”] ….

We ought to get rid of the bill [Georgia’s six-week abortion ban that restricts abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected]. The bill is asinine, it is biologically inappropriate. It is morally wrong, and it should be confined to the dustbin of history….

We have to stop whispering about abortion rights in the shadows and talk about it openly…. It is about how we move our bodies. It is about how we live our lives. This is not a cultural issue. This is a medical issue, it is an economic issue, it is a moral issue, and it is our decision.

… If they can take our vote, our right to control our bodies, they can take our right to decide who to love, they can take all of our civil liberties from us. And every time they chip away at a civil liberty, if you think you’re safe, just wait, they’re coming for you next.

            Pandolfo wrote that Abrams’ “claims are not medically accurate.” According to a review of cardiac development published by Karger (a fetal medicine journal), “The initiation of the first heartbeat via the primitive heart tube begins at gestational day 22, followed by active fetal blood circulation by the end of week 4.” In other words, the heart is one of the first organs to form after conception. Pandolfo continued his explanation:

While it is true that an embryo does not have a fully formed heart at day 22, by the sixth week of gestation in pregnancy an unborn baby’s primitive heartbeat can be detected by an ultrasound. Doctors refer to this as a “manufactured” sound because it is an electrical pulse picked up and translated into sound by the ultrasound machine. But that does not mean the heartbeat is not present and is fabricated by doctors, as Abrams falsely claimed.

            Abrams has stated that she supports abortion even “until the time of birth” in some circumstances and said that it should be a “medical decision” instead of a “political decision.” Abrams must have heard about the primitive heartbeat being called a “manufactured” and assumed that doctors were manufacturing it. She obviously did not understand that it was the ultrasound machine translating an electrical impulse into a sound.

            Abrams was wrong about numerous things in her statement, but she was absolutely correct about abortion being a moral issue. Every human being has the right to choose how to live their lives. However, they are not free from the consequences of those choices. Conception of a baby is the result of the choice to have sexual relations. Once a woman has made the decision to have sex, her opportunity to choose is over because there is another human being involved. No one has the right to kill another human being, not even the mother of an unborn baby. As for babies that are conceived by rape or incest, most abortion bans have waivers to care for those women and girls.