I’ve never been pregnant. But I’ve had friends and family with babies and spoken to enough women to know that it’s an emotional experience. What certainly doesn’t ring true is the backlash called for by some historians discussed in Erikson’s article:
‘German historian Barbara Duden has urged women to reclaim their reproductive subjectivity by rejecting ultrasound. Such technology, she argues, redefines pregnancy as “a disembodied realization of an optical imputation” and reduces women to “uterine environments for the development of fetal growth
But what Duden ignores is how much would need to be undone. Looking is now cognition. To truly know, one could not not look. The looking did not begin, as she suggests, in 1965 when LIFE magazine published Nilsson’s photographs.34 Rather, the social ground that normalizes and naturalizes the technological feat of obstetrical ultrasound is by now hundreds of years old.’
Most of my friends would not, I’m sure, view their ultrasounds as an optical imputation. But at the same time, so much of pregnancy is also about ritual - in the social sphere (baby showers) but also in the medical sphere (regular check-ups, the ultrasound, etc.) It is, as Erikson writes, “a habitualized act.”
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there was some sort of collective call against this habitualization. I wasn’t able to find much, but those I did ran a range of reasons, not all of which Duden would have appreciated.
“My midwife wants to do one at 8 weeks (I'm about 5 or 6 now.) I'm thinking of waiving all ultrasounds unless absolutely necessary. I've read about the negative effects, such as the harm on the baby's cells, and ultrasounds being linked to autism.”
“I had none with my last. It made the moment when I saw her so much more special because it truly was my very first look at her!!”
“I really did not want any ultrasounds. My midwife is required to have me do an anatomy scan. I reluctantly did it, and really regretted it. The doctor told us the sex (which we didn't want to know) and sent us into a panic over a suspected heart defect, that required me to have another stronger ultrasound with a specialist. I had the second US this morning, and it turns out that the "defect" was just that the baby was lying in a position that blocked his complete view. We were scared for two weeks for nothing. I just felt that I needed to have trusted my mother instinct that told me not to have ultrasounds. I wish my MW would have supported that.”
Seems like at least to some, the resistance isn’t to subjectification as to the over-medicalization, and the fear of over intervention leading to further health problems. Some more situated ethnography closer to women’s voices would be great to see in this area.
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