What a pregnancy actually looks like at nine weeks - in pictures

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/pregnancy-weeks-abortion-tissue

No paywall
https://archive.ph/0hzyk

Abortion is now banned or severely restricted in 14 states in the US, the outcome of a decades-long campaign by anti-abortion advocates. In many states, abortion is no longer seen as a health procedure, but a morality issue. Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano – once a state senator, now running for governor – is one of a number of Republican politicians who has called for murder charges for people who defy abortion bans.

In 13 of those 14 states, abortion is banned even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.

These images, supplied to us by the MYA Network, a network of clinicians and activists who came together earlier in the pandemic when some states tried to deem abortion as “non-essential” medical care, show what tissue in the first nine weeks of pregnancy actually looks like.



Four weeks of pregnancy. Photograph: MYA Network
Above is early pregnancy tissue, at four weeks of pregnancy.

Dr Joan Fleischman, part of the MYA Network, uses a gentle handheld device that removes the tissue. This more delicate type of extraction keeps it intact.



Five weeks of pregnancy. Photograph: MYA Network
Above is pregnancy tissue extracted at five weeks.

Sometimes, patients want to see the tissue after an abortion. “They are stunned by what it actually looks like,” says Fleischman. “That’s when I realized how much the imagery on the internet and on placards – showing human-like qualities at this early stage of development – has really permeated the culture. People almost don’t believe this is what comes out.”

*snip*

[Mike_in_LA]

1. Awwwwwww!

She has her father's eyes!!!!

[gratuitous]

2. No fair!

The only representation of a fetus that is allowed in the discussion of abortion is this one:



Introducing facts and actual photos of what we're talking about is strictly unfair, because it doesn't inflame people's emotions the way the photo of a smiling, happy, white baby does.

[Nevilledog]

4. People are so indoctrinated.

Maybe if we had effective reproductive health teaching in schools.

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Jessica Valenti
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Oct 19, 2022
@JessicaValenti
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Replying to @JessicaValenti
Literally commenters calling me a liar, saying they're pro-choice but insisting I'm spreading misinformation...it's very much a 'don't believe your lying eyes situation'

Jessica Valenti
@JessicaValenti
·
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Here’s what has people so fired up - they can’t believe that the images they’ve been shown about pregnancy and abortion aren’t real


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3:28 PM · Oct 19, 2022

[gratuitous]

7. Maybe we go the NRA route

You know how in discussions of firearm regulation, there always seems to be one jackass who disqualifies the opinions of anyone who calls a semi-automatic weapon an automatic weapon or who calls a magazine a clip?

Quick multiple choice quiz before starting. Show the anti-abortion folks these photos and ask them to identify the number of weeks' gestation they're looking at. Margin of error one week. You can't identify a six-week embryo? Bzzzzt! Your opinion is disqualified. Can an ectopic pregnancy be removed from the fallopian tube and implanted in the uterus? Yes? Bzzzzt! And so on. If you don't know what you're talking about, you don't get to decide how everyone else runs their lives.

[Nevilledog]

9. That works.

Currently I cut people of that don't know the "heartbeat" one hears pre-12 weeks is just a sound picked by the sonagram's manufacturer to depict cardiac cell activity. They could have picked literally any sound to be emitted.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. The radicalized Republican party will not let facts interfere with the march to total control.

[vercetti2021]

5. Looks like every guys sock

Should we outlaw masturbation next?

[Martin Eden]

17. Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.

[Lefta Dissenter]

6. Thanks for sharing this

This is a really interesting and eye-opening article. Mr. Lefta asked me to send it to him so he could share it with some of his cray-cray Trump supporting anti-choice relatives.

[Nevilledog]

8. Good!

[Phoenix61]

10. That makes sense when you consider how many pregnancies

miscarry early on. Often without the woman even knowing she was pregnant. Kinda blows the hell out of that “heartbeat at 6 weeks” bs.

[maxsolomon]

11. It doesn't matter to Anti-Choice zealots.

A zygote is a POTENTIAL infant. Choosing to end the process of development, of growing the baby, is the sin.

"Life begins at conception" is a binary assertion. Anything after that is Abortion. That concept allows them to shut out any discussion of grey areas of what constitutes life or a fetus. Hence the refusal of GQP Legislatures to consider exceptions for ectopic pregnancies and other conditions that endanger the life of the mother, even if the pregnancy is doomed.

[Nevilledog]

12. No.... They actually think you can identify, by sight, the fetus as a baby.

[maxsolomon]

16. The "heartbeat", at least.

9 weeks is the 1st week that a fetus is considered a fetus; before that it's embryonic.

none of that matters to a anti-choice zealot, because the "baby" already has a soul. which, conveniently, isn't quantifiable.

[purr-rat beauty]

13. I am not discrediting this study but...

....there's not a single other source to corroborate this information I can find (on the internet)

why is that?

It's all "fetus" images

so either this is not true or the internet is telling a big lie

[WhiskeyGrinder]

14. Lol what

[Nevilledog]

18. Here's the website. If you're really interested, listen to the recordings.

https://myanetwork.org/the-issue-of-tissue/

[Talitha]

15. Very enlightening - thanks for posting this, Nevilledog!!