Reading Reflections, March 9th

In “Fatal Views,” Erikson writes about the many ways the use of prenatal ultrasound as a medical practice depends on “a confluence of scientific, technological and medical domains”, and is shaped by “systems of knowledge, belief and behavior”. She first discusses the development of human’s anatomical knowledge of fetus since the sixteenth century. She argues that the exclusion of women from European universities hindered the progress in the anatomy of pregnant women and fetus. She also emphasizes the shift from “touch to knowing” to “seeing as knowing” in the sixteenth century, which later would become a major epistemological shift related to modern medical imaging. From the social perspective, she argues that the development of German obstetrics was facilitated by the “supply” of dead bodies that hospitals were able to acquire by offering free care to poor unmarried women. These examples show that the development of human’s collective knowledge of fetus depended upon social and cultural factors.

In “Of Sonograms and Baby Prams” and “Sonography and Sociality,” Taylor and Gammeltoft focus instead on how obstetrical ultrasound affects the pregnant women. Taylor argues that, in US society, the use of obstetrical ultrasound is tied to the consumer-capitalist culture, and specifically, it puts the pregnant women into the position of “consumers” – a metaphor she admits to be quite strange – besides also being a “laboror”. Gammeltoft, however, provided a more complicated view about how pregnant women in Hanoi, Vietnam feel about ultrasound imaging. While Taylor thinks that pregnant women gain pleasure from seeing their babies via ultrasound, Gammeltoft writes that Vietnamese pregnant women were skeptical about the trustworthiness and safety of ultrasound imaging, which she attributes to the “socially and historically generated local experiences of the inherent riskiness of reproduction”. Contrasting Taylor’s and Gammeltoft’s descriptions, I wonder how much of the differences between how US and Vietnamese pregnant view obstetric ultrasound can be attributed to the cultural differences, which I think is very interesting.