A pro-choice feminist reacts to her ultrasound:
“I lay on the cool slab of padded stretcher watching as she [the ultrasound technician] moves the instrument across me. ..
She becomes the eyes that this technology takes from me. Yet I am the one who is asked to fashion the gaze that she produces- to turn and twist and interpret until I have called the fetus in from its shadows, from its blurry frozen lines and taken it, like the picture book snapshot I hold in my hand, and made it real….
Each time the face of the baby retreats, I long for its return as I so much want to participate in the this drama of creation. Here, in the ultrasound room, is where this “life” is created.
Here is where I know there is no turning back. Here is where the howling ghostly possibility becomes real. Here is where the dewing begins, the aural images of feet, head, heart, spine, bone are all taken and pieced together and handed back to me like the fuzzy snapshots I clutch so carefully.
Here is where the notion of wholeness becomes reified through a collection of the pieces of the phantom fetal body. No longer just part of the mother, a dreamlike possibility hovering somewhere in still fluids. “
Karen L. Carr “Optical Allusions: Hysterical Memories and the Screening of Pregnant Sites” Postmodern Culture V. 5 n . 2 January 1995
