When Are Heartbeats Audible During Pregnancy?

Q: When is the human heart fully developed, and when are heartbeats audible during pregnancy?

A: A developing heart has all of its primary structures after about nine weeks of pregnancy. Some forms of ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo in the sixth week, but a heartbeat wouldn’t be audible until about 10 weeks on a Doppler fetal monitor.

FULL QUESTION

When does an ACTUAL heart become fully functioning and formed?

When do doctors actually hear a heartbeat?

I was confused after reading a Popular Science article along with information shared by MayoClinic. Thank you for any information that you can provide.

FULL ANSWER

In the past four months, five states (Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia and Louisiana) have passed laws that ban abortion once a heartbeat becomes detectable during a pregnancy, which is generally possible by the sixth week of gestation, or the fourth week after conception. 

For this reason, abortion rights advocates such as Planned Parenthood refer to these measures as six-week abortion bans. Others, including proponents, call them “heartbeat” and sometimes “fetal heartbeat” legislation. All of the state laws allow abortion if the pregnant woman’s life or physical health is severely endangered, but only some make exceptions for fatal chromosomal anomalies in the fetus or in cases of rape or incest.

“Fetal heartbeat” is more of a legal term than a medical one, as some of the state laws specifically define a fetus as existing from the moment of conception. In medicine, however, a fetus doesn’t exist until eight weeks after fertilization, or at the end of the 10th week of pregnancy, when all the major organ systems have begun to form. Before then, the correct term