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Fetal Heartbeats: How the 'Heartbeat Bill' Will Reshape America's Abortion Fight

Case Study Anti-abortion groups begin a brazen campaign to make women listen to a heartbeat before they end a pregnancy

Cohen is the author of Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America.

Abortion opponents have a new weapon of choice: the “heartbeat bill.” A coalition of anti-abortion groups told the Associated Press last week last week that it was pushing to enact laws in all 50 states that would make women listen to a fetus’s heart beat before they could abort. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has introduced a similar federal bill, The Heartbeat Informed Consent Act, in Congress.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe, critics of abortion vowed to get it overturned. They have not succeeded in that. But they have managed to pass a wide array of laws — some upheld by the courts, others struck down — making access to abortion more difficult. The Supreme Court has ruled that states can impose some restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent requirements, but has struck down others, such as laws forcing women to notify their spouses. The heartbeat laws are the latest effort in a decades-long campaign that — as conservatives gain strength at the state level—appears to be gaining ground.

(MORE: The Grass-Roots Abortion War)

Recently, abortion opponents have been pushing some tough new restrictions — and prompting lawsuits over whether they go too far. Five states — Indiana, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma — have adopted laws that ban almost all abortions after the five-month mark. Meanwhile, Ohio is considering enacting the most extreme anti-abortion law in the nation. Its House of Representatives has voted for a bill that would ban all abortions once a heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks. That is a frontal assault on Roe, which recognized a right to abortion until “viability,” the point — around the 22nd week — when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The new heartbeat bills don’t go quite as far — they would simply require abortion providers to make the fetus’s heartbeat audible to a woman seeking an abortion. Supporters argue that making the woman listen to the heartbeat — or look at an ultrasound image of the fetus, as Bachmann’s bill also requires — is important for true “informed consent.” They also believe that women who are provided with this kind of information are less likely to end their pregnancies. According to Bachmann, a poll by Focus on the Family, a group opposed to abortion, found that when women who were undecided about whether to end a pregnancy were shown an ultrasound of the fetus, 78% did not have the abortion.

Abortion rights advocates, however, insist that the heartbeat bills are an attempt to interfere with women’s right to make private medical decisions. They argue that the state has no business trying to lobby patients about medical procedures, or to turn doctors into government mouthpieces. At the moment, popular opinion is sharply divided on whether the state should require women to confront evidence of a fetus’s development. A Gallup poll in July found that 50% of those surveyed supported laws requiring women to be shown ultrasound images of their fetuses, while 46% were opposed.

But critics of these bills scored an important win in August, when a federal judge struck down parts of a new Texas law requiring women seeking an abortion in most cases to view a sonogram and listen to the fetal heart beat. Judge Sam Sparks ruled that the Texas law — which Gov. Rick Perry helped to push through the legislature — violated the First Amendment. “The act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree,” he said. The issue could end up in the Supreme Court.

(MORE: Rick Perry’s Mission)

While challenges to heartbeat laws make their way through the courts, anti-abortion forces are working on new — and in some cases more radical — measures. Next month, Mississippi will vote on whether to add a “personhood amendment” to its state constitution that would declare that personhood begins at conception. If it passes — and a court does not block it — the amendment could ban all abortions in the state and even some kinds of contraception, such as IUDs.

The Mississippi amendment may sound outrageous — and critics are pointing out how sweeping its implications could be. (One Mississippi law professor has suggested that if life begins at conception, state residents might be eligible to vote at the age of 17 and 3 months) It is unlikely that the Supreme Court would allow Mississippi to ban all abortions, but one thing seems inevitable: more fights over how far the states can go to rein in the constitutional right to abortion.

Hot Potato: USDA Wants Limits, But Spuds Could Help Fight Hunger

Taste of America The USDA wants to curb school children’s spud consumption, but the tuber could still be a superweapon against global hunger Kathryn Russell / Getty Images

Ozersky's latest book The Hamburger: A History was published in 2008.

The USDA, in a rare moment of regulatory exertion, has decided to try to limit the amount of potatoes children eat in their school lunches. The plan is to cut back on potatoes to two servings a week, as part of the less starch, more whole grain program that doctors have been trying to promote for years. I’m not unsympathetic to the difficulties facing public health officials, nor do I buy the plaintive cries of potato-producing states worrying where children will get their calcium from. The last thing American kids need today are more potatoes. But what about tomorrow?

For Americans and for most of the human race, tubers make up a good part of the calories we consume. But we take them for granted, considering them for the most part as inert and inevitable. Meanwhile, the potato is as central and secret to our culinary life as a man’s skeleton, and as difficult to run away from. Growers in Idaho and Washington planted 10% more potatoes this year than last, and there are more potatoes being grown nationwide as well. And given that Canada is having a generally crappy potato harvest, this means American spuds are riding high. In an increasingly hungry world, food production on a truly titanic scale becomes a decisive political force. In that sense, the humble potato could turn into a kind of agricultural superweapon. Hardy and rugged, and able to grow almost anywhere in any season, it can feed whole populations, and often has. The Irish potato famine was so devastating because the people had been subsisting almost entirely on these tubers; when the potato crop went bad, there was nothing left to eat. As the American economy goes into the tank, starvation and want are increasingly becoming stateside perils. So the potato, and its unsurpassed ability to provide cheap calories throughout the year, is going to be more important than ever. Which is why the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that potatoes deserve our gratitude, respect and imagination—three things they, as a staple crop, tend not to get much of in America.

(MORE: Bagels: An American Tragedy)

One of the few things we export in vast amounts to China, potatoes dehydrate well and you can ship them cheaply anywhere; they can feed the world, and in fact they do. As the global population rises, more people are going to need more potatoes to stay alive. Moreover, if, as we are so often told, the future will offer less grazing land and hence less meat, the potato will be asked to fill the gap, a starchy Atlas shouldering global hunger.

So we need to make our peace with the potato. Which means treating it right. An enormous amount of innovation has gone into potatoes over the years, but nearly all of it has been for commercial and food-service applications. Chefs and home cooks still bake, mash, boil and roast potatoes the way they did 100 years ago or, for that matter, 400 years ago. But because we take the potato for granted, we are often blind to its possibilities. Take hash browns, for example. Too often, especially in my home city of New York, hash browns take the form of old boiled or roasted potatoes that have been cut up into little pieces. These waterlogged lumps are then thrown on a griddle to brown—barely—on one side. They don’t get a nice crust, and they’re usually not good for much beyond absorbing runny eggs. Their steakhouse cousins, meanwhile, rarely taste of anything other than butter. Potatoes grow in the dark and in some ways they continue to exist there, always overshadowed by sour cream or bacon or salty crunch. This is going to have to change; there is less meat and more hash on the horizon, and everybody needs to step up their treatment of this noblest of nature’s gifts.

It can be done. British culinary genius Heston Blumenthal, in my friend Melanie Dunea’s My Last Supper: The Next Course, named as his kiss-off meal roast potatoes, and included a recipe so simple and wonderful that everyone who tried it collectively face-palmed. The potatoes are quartered, then obsessively rinsed, then boiled until they’re almost ready to fall apart; then they are drained and roasted in olive oil. The results are astonishing. The interior is creamy, and there are multiple dimensions of crunch, as microfissures from the boiling open up avenues to the oil deep into every inch of the potato. And yet somehow they’re not greasy. The “supersonic” french fries created at Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine food lab outside Seattle achieve a similar result through elaborate treatment with multiple technologies; who knew that you could do it at home with a pot and a colander? More importantly, why did it take Heston freaking Blumenthal to figure out how to make a simple roast potato? I find this mind-blowing. The culinary world needs to take potatoes as seriously as they do, say, ramen noodles. Potatoes taste better, and they might just save the world.