All women who become pregnant in the U.S. today face making choices around a variety of technologies of pregnancy and childbirth. Sonograms allow the potential mother and her supporters to "meet" a fetus on a television monitor. Ultrasound is an "imaging" technology only because the data from the sound waves is portrayed as an image. After all, sound waves do not "make" pictures without the mediation of computer technology. Ultrasound could be portrayed as a graph, for example. The fact that it is portrayed as an image of the fetus has significant effects on how we experience and "read" the information the technology offers. These uterine "baby pictures" make pregnancy more real in some ways, and more surreal in other ways.

Feminist scholars suggest that the real-time fetus is a social fetus--that is, an entity whose meaning is mediated by technical imaging and the privilege of a medical visualization. They also show biomedical technologies to be cultural objects with the power to define what it means to be human, a mother, healthy, and normal.

Ultrasound technology affects the doctor-patient relationship by allowing physicians to sidestep pregnant women's self-reports for their own visual tracking of the fetus. During labor, many women say that the nurses and doctors don't even look at them anymore, but come into their rooms and look at the fetal monitor (an ultrasound device). Further, with such technology pregnancy increasingly becomes an object of medical speculation and intervention. Although the technology has not been found to improve the birth outcomes for non-high risk pregnancies, their use in hospital birthing rooms is now ubiquitous because of a mandate by insurance companies.

Although many women are comforted by the knowledge that their fetuses are healthy--for example, the ultrasound can rule out spina bifida, which is indicated by the spine not fully closing--ultrasound imaging technologies have contributed to the cultural idea that fetuses deserve all the rights of living people. Fetal imaging has given us a picture of a fetus that is visually separate from the pregnant woman carrying the fetus. The technology thus affects our understanding, framing, and experience of the mother, the fetus, personhood, and pregnancy.

Lennart Nilsson’s color photographs shown here are mostly taken of fetuses not in the womb but extracted from the womb (i.e., they were obtained through spontaneous or surgical abortion). Through cropping and other techniques of representation, the photographer offers a particular way of viewing the fetus; the same fetus in a jar might cause a different reaction. Fetal imaging and other prenatal technologies, such as amniocentesis, have influenced public commentary on pregnancy and debates over abortion rights and disability rights. They also raise significant questions, such as: Does prenatal diagnosis stigmatize or empower? Is it possible to support simultaneously a woman's right to use prenatal diagnostic techniques, a woman's right to refuse it, the rights of disabled people, and the rights of employees whose employers might practice genetic discrimination?

Suggested Reading:
Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge, 2000.