In 2013, North Dakota became the first state to pass legislation banning abortions after six weeks. While that proposal failed, a flurry of copycat legislation was proposed in several other states, which has not abated since then. Her efforts were not considered mainstream at the time, and the Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion group which previously employed Porter, opposed such legislation. The activist thus authored the Ohio House Bill 493 in 2011, and arranged for heart-shaped balloons and fetuses' 'testimony' in the legislature, but the bill failed to get out of the Senate because the lawmakers feared the bill was unconstitutional. Its founder and leader, Janet Porter, said that she was frustrated by what she saw was slow progress in banning pregnancy termination around the United States. The heartbeat bills are based on model legislation created by Faith2Action, a conservative Christian ministry from Ohio advocating for abortion restrictions. Reproductive rights advocates, on the other hand, say that these bans are de facto complete abortion bans, since many women do not even know that they are pregnant six weeks after their last menstruation, which is four weeks post-fertilization. Porter's anti-abortion group argues that a heartbeat 'is the universally recognized indicator of life'. Jackson Women's Health Organization in other states, such as Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee, judges lifted the injunctions against the previously passed laws.

In some states, the heartbeat bills' effect (whether blocked or not) has been minimized by more stringent total abortion bans that were announced following the decision in Dobbs v. However, the Texas law and analogues subsequently adopted in other states succeeded due to a unique enforcement mechanism that makes challenging the law extremely difficult, and which was upheld by the Supreme Court. Efforts to introduce her model law succeeded in passing through political branches of government in about a dozen states, but in most cases the courts struck down or blocked similar legislation. Janet Porter, an anti-abortion activist from Ohio, is considered to be the person that first authored this type of legislation. Medical professionals advise that a true fetal heartbeat cannot be detected until around 17 to 20 weeks of gestation when the chambers of the heart have become sufficiently developed. Medical and reproductive health experts, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, say that the reference to a fetal heartbeat is medically inaccurate and intentionally misleading because a conceptus is not called a fetus until eight weeks after fertilization, as well as that at four weeks after fertilization, the embryo has no heart, only a group of cells which will become a heart. Law passed but blocked or struck down by court orderĪ six-week abortion ban, also called a ' fetal heartbeat bill' by proponents, is a law in the United States which makes abortion illegal as early as six weeks gestational age (two weeks after a woman's first missed period), which is when proponents falsely claim that a 'fetal heartbeat' can be detected.

Texas fetal heartbeat