Planned Parenthood quietly made changes to its website to reflect Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s claim that babies do not have detectable heartbeats at six weeks gestation, the Washington Examiner reported.
"There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks," Abrams said at an event at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center in Atlanta on Wednesday. "It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman's body."
Abrams, who is trailing her opponent Gov. Brian Kemp (R.) by 6.6 points in the polls, was speaking against Georgia’s "heartbeat" bill, which went into effect in July and bans most abortions once a heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks.
On Friday, Planned Parenthood changed its website, without any notice, to say that at five to six weeks of pregnancy "a part of the embryo starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it's not a fully-formed heart—it's the earliest stage of the heart developing."
The webpage used to say "a very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop," according to internet archives.
According to the National Library of Medicine, at five weeks a "baby’s heart begins to develop" and at six weeks a "baby’s heart continues to grow and now beats at a regular rhythm."
In an attempt to make abortion a key issue in the November elections, the abortion advocacy group plans to spend $50 million on Democratic campaigns, while the economy remains the chief concern for most voters.