Note: “6 weeks” counts from last-period-date, so it means as little as two weeks since conception, which is before many women realize they are pregnant
Note: “6 weeks” counts from last-period-date, so it means as little as two weeks since conception, which is before many women realize they are pregnant
Medical providers backdate pregnancies to the date of suspected conception – which is less precise than many realize.
This is a standard practice in how it’s done. Theoretically, a medical provider could fudge the date a bit. That’s high risk for them, though.
Right so if we are to believe the comment in the OP (I skimmed the article but didn’t see anything to support it), the law ignores conception date. So if you get pregnant three weeks after your period and it takes you another three weeks to even notice you’re pregnant, it’s already too late to abort. Doctor fudging the conception date doesn’t matter, you have to lie about period date.
The conception date is based on the date of last period. That’s the actual medical practice, generally, so in practice these are the same official date. I’m not sure if this excludes times the couple asserts an exact date of conception, though clearly it does in the case of this law.
Yes, you likely could lie/feign ignorance about that date. Hopefully everyone with a uterus will be wise enough to do so. But if you claim your last period was yesterday, it does make your claim suspect. Again, hopefully any doctor will pretend nothing is amiss in these cases.
Oh that’s interesting. This was years ago but I thought the doctor I used guessed the age based on size/features seen in the scan.
Fetal development is not really that consistent, to guess it down to a week or two based on physical appearance. Anything from 37 to 42 weeks is considered a “normal” pregnancy length. That means someone oversimplifying things could say any milestone might be +/- a couple of weeks. Edge cases might move the length of an otherwise-healthy pregnancy down or up an entire month.
Even implantation isn’t that consistent. I’ve heard that sperm can linger for something like 5 days before implantation occurs. The whole middle-school health class version where the sperm swim up and race to the egg is kind of total nonsense.
Sperm can linger for 5d to fertilize. Implantation of the embryo is a separate process.