The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction

Chapter 4: Love Machine: The Theory of Ultrasound Bonding

77 4 Love Machine The Theory of Ultrasound Bonding [The Tin Man, to Dorothy]: “Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?” —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz When I met Pamela J., a thirty-eight-year-old child-care provider, she was pregnant with her fourth child and had come to the ultrasound clinic for a routine exam. Afterward, she reflected on her experience of pregnancy and how it differed from that of women in her mother’s generation: Well, now we have all these new technologies. . . . I don’t know what infant mortality was back then, I don’t think there was so much emphasis on monitoring the baby—but now, you find out the health of the baby, you find out the sex, and that bonds you to the baby. When I found out it made me bond more with the baby instead of focusing on the negatives of pregnancy. The idea Pamela voiced here, that ultrasound technology helps women to “bond” emotionally with the fetuses they carry, is one widely accepted and frequently articulated by ordinary laypersons and medical professionals alike. For brevity’s sake, I shall refer to this idea (somewhat awkwardly) as “the theory of ultrasound bonding.” This theory links the pleasure that many women take in the sight of ultrasound imagery to the social and emotional transformations that take place in the course of pregnancy, thereby suggesting that ultrasound technology accelerates and improves upon the natural process by which pregnant women enter into a specifically maternal relationship to the fetus. bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Talk of “bonding” comes easily in the contemporary United States. We speak of bonding1 not only between mothers and their infants, but between coworkers, acquaintances, siblings, lovers, strangers thrown together by circumstance, even large groups of people united by some common goal or experience. Indeed, the term’s meaning as used in everyday parlance is broad enough to encompass a sentence such as this: “As part of a bonding ritual in their fledgling white supremacist group, the three men took [James] Byrd [Jr.] to a remote part of town, beat him, and chained his legs together before attaching them to the truck” (Sullivan :). Bonding thus can involve hate or fear as well as love, and can produce ties of criminal conspiracy as easily as those of kinship. It is a sort of catch-all term used to indicate that some process of social relationship formation is taking place, while telling us very little about exactly how that process works or exactly what sort of relationship results. Currently, bonding is invoked in everyday speech to describe all kinds of relationships while explaining nothing about them precisely. The word is recent: the term “bonding” was coined only as recently as the early s and initially referred quite exclusively to the relationship between a mother and her infant, about which it was thought to explain a great deal indeed. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines bonding as “the formation of a close personal relationship (as between a mother and child) esp. through frequent or constant association” and claims that this usage dates to just . This new meaning emerged out of the research of scientists, including most notably the pediatricians John Kennell and Marshall Klaus, who (as will be discussed in more detail below) sought to document, understand , and strengthen the processes by which mothers form relationships with their children in the period immediately following birth. Previously, “bonding” as a verbal noun was hardly used at all, and the word “bond,” used as a verb, had two principal senses. In one usage, “to bond” referred to physical processes of causing things to adhere closely to one another: the “bonding” together of surfaces by means of glue, for example, or the chemical “bonding” of atoms. In another usage, “to bond” referred to the legal and financial process of undertaking a debt or obligation: “to secure payment of duties and taxes (on goods) by giving a bond.” Echoes of these two older meanings persist in the idea of maternalinfant “bonding” as proposed by the researchers who pioneered the term. PUBLIC LIFE OF THE FETAL SONOGRAM 78 On the one hand, the concept posits that mothers and their infants can be socially “glued” together in an almost physical manner, and on the other hand, it speaks of a universal obligation and duty of mothers to love and nurture their offspring. In an...