Pro-choice writer Lisa M Mitchell complains about how ultrasounds reveal preborn babies:
“Struggles over the meanings of personhood have implications for other persons, and I’m interested in the ramifications of “seeing” into women and “seeing” particular fetuses…
To what extent is [ultrasound] disempowering, subjecting women, fetuses, men, and sonographers to a normalizing gaze?…
What has been the evidentiary status of fetal images in the struggle over abortion rights?”
Lisa M Mitchell Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2001) 12
Mitchell is so out of touch that she puts the word “seeing” in quotes, as if she can’t quite accept that we can actually see a preborn baby.
One wonders how many women, going in for an ultrasound and seeing their baby on the screen, feel that the ultrasound was “disempowering.”
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