|
Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - July 28 2003
The window into the womb now opens even
earlier
It was bound to happen. Now even the womb has succumbed to the
marketplace. In Canada, the first entertainment ultrasound business
has opened. 4-D ultrasound provides a realistic picture of your
baby before it is born.
No more blurry images of the traditional ultrasound. The stills
and live-action video generated are often clear enough to evaluate
subtle facial features and to judge who the baby resembles.
4-D ultrasound was used sparingly for diagnostic purposes in high-risk
pregnancies. It hasn't taken long for it to metamorphose into a
business opportunity. If nothing else, its promotion is an example
of how medicine is increasingly at the service of sales and marketing
departments.
The American makers, General Electric, are marketing it not just
to doctors but directly to the consumer. In the United States it
runs prime-time commercials featuring well-dressed, teary-eyed parents
gazing at their nearly full-term baby floating in the womb accompanied
by the ballad The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
Obstetricians, keen to maximise their revenue streams, have been
advertising "Come See Your Baby for $150".
Meanwhile, new software designed to accompany the 4-D ultrasound
allows expectant parents a simulated, virtual feel of their foetus
while watching the monitor.
In Canada, the technician who has set up the first private clinic
calls her service "bonding" ultrasound. She offers gift certificates
and says it would make a great baby shower present.
"It's amazing," she said in a recent interview, "until you get
the baby, you can't believe it's real."
Pardon? In my time, the morning sickness, protruding belly and
kicking baby were enough to alert parents to the reality of their
child. And as for bonding, that was traditionally the process that
happened after your child was born.
It was part of an initiation that enabled you to realise the inescapable
reality of a child and the end to your previous please-yourself
life. Obviously parenting has changed greatly. Now that bonding
process is often cut short - by the quick return to the workforce
and the arrival of caregivers.
So rather than pushing back the tide of encroachment into a new
mother's bonding time with her infant, technology has instead encroached
on a baby's final weeks of blissful privacy. Aside from the remarkable
thought that today's instant-gratification generation may be better
able to bond with their children via predigested technology, turning
their pregnancy into little more than the latest reality TV show,
the real issue is the ultrasound's usefulness to anti-abortionists.
In North Carolina, a Christian-run crisis pregnancy centre has
bought a 4-D ultrasound machine as a "window to the womb", offering
to scan "abortion-vulnerable" women in their first trimester.
Supporters of the technology say the US$120,000 ($205,000) machines
should be in every pregnancy help centre, and some are pushing for
a law that requires every pregnant woman seeking an abortion to
view this image of her baby.
This despite the fact that the ultrasound images that are proving
so emotive are of almost full-term babies, while nine out of 10
abortions are within the first trimester, many months before the
foetus is recognisable, let alone viable.
In the hands of anti-abortionists, the 4-D technology is a cynical
and manipulative tool that reduces the abortion quandary to a strip
of black-and-white footage, while further distorting the reasons
many women seek abortion.
There is no doubt this latest piece of technology will be at the
forefront of the anti-abortion crusade, a key tool for neo-conservatives
intent on overturning 30 years of reproductive rights.
Carol Moseley Braun, a former ambassador to New Zealand, says
that if George W. Bush is re-elected, within six years all affirmative
action will be gone, including the hard-won right to safe, legal,
controlled abortion.
And certainly proponents of foetal rights are on a roll. Last
month the US passed the misleading and emotively named Partial-Birth
Abortion Ban Act.
Countless commentators have noted that the bill was fuelled by
misinformation and inaccurate and inflammatory rhetoric. The measure
callously disregards women's health, removing their needs entirely
in favour of a radical anti-choice agenda.
In one extreme case, anti-abortionists are seeking to appoint
a guardian for a 5-month-old foetus of a mentally retarded Florida
woman, made pregnant by rape.
A group of pro-choice organisations say that if a third party
is allowed to represent the foetus under these circumstances, there
would be no logical reason they would not seek to do so in the case
of a competent pregnant woman considering an abortion or treatment
detrimental to her foetus.
Ultimately, the most effective way to reduce abortion is to reduce
unintended pregnancies. But that would entail the type of reality
check and a complex mix of education and access to contraception
that is anathema to President Bush, with his antichoice policy initiatives,
such as the bid to scrap health insurance coverage for contraceptives
for federal employees.
Whichever way you look at it, the womb has become deeply political.
And somewhere in the middle of the battle between the warm fuzzy
commercialisation and the narrow anti-abortion zealots, there will
always be a woman struggling to make a choice, while she still can,
with or without the machiavellian use of technology.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
Send your comments to:
Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
|
