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Also regarding RU 486, Glasow says, "It kills an unborn baby whose heart has started to beat." Heilig characterizes this assertion as "a total absurdity. That early in pregnancy," he says, the embryo is "something you can't even see with the naked eye." ¹

Both of these statements — as is typical of most of the abortion issue rhetoric — have some truth to them, and neither one is precisely correct, because both speakers exaggerated the true facts to make them seem more favorable to their own causes.

If the French standards are adopted here — a condition that the drug's makers insist upon before allowing it into any country — RU 486 will be administered as late as seven weeks into a pregnancy, when the fetus is five weeks old. At that point, it is about seven millimeters long (just over a quarter of an inch, for the non-metrically minded). ¹² This is about the size of, say, your average cooked green pea. On the one hand, this is certainly big enough to be visible to the unaided human eye. On the other hand, it's not something that a woman would notice expelling during the course of a menstrual period. In fact, that's one reason why a simple survey method will not reveal accurate statistics on the number of miscarriages: most women don't even know they were ever pregnant.

Now, the heartbeat is actually one of the first things to occur in a developing embryo — before nerve connections, sex differentiation, or electrical activity in the brain. One source says the heart begins to beat typically near the end of the fourth week after fertilization, or approximately six weeks into the pregnancy. ¹² Another specifies that the first contractions of the heart muscle — which at this point is a simple tube, like a fish's heart, rather than the four-chambered apparatus present at birth — may at the extreme begin as early as day twenty-one, although functional circulation doesn't begin until the end of the fourth week. ² At any rate, it is possible that in any given case, RU 486 will be aborting an embryo whose heart has already started to beat — though it is by no means assured.

The pertinent question here, though, is "So what?" As demonstrated earlier, the beginning of a heartbeat is just another arbitrary point along the continuum of human development, with no particular relevance to the personhood of the embryo. The only criteria of importance is brain function.

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