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

Chapter 6: Entertaining Fetuses: Keepsake Ultrasound and Crisis Pregnancy Centers

144 6 Entertaining Fetuses Keepsake Ultrasound and Crisis Pregnancy Centers I mean, this stuff looks cool. Google and you’ll see. By comparison, seeing routine sonograms at your doctor’s office is like watching Disney’s “Fantasia” on your great-aunt’s rabbit-eared black-and-white Magnavox. Still, part of me cannot help thinking: “Man, do we need another way to a) fuel our culture’s [and parents’] baby-mania and b) separate doting moms-and-dads-to-be from their money?” There’s also this point. . . . Antiabortion activists think this stuff looks pretty cool, too. Several Web sites I peeked at tout stills from these videos (and in some cases, videos themselves) as “proof” that abortion is wrong. . . . Neither this, nor the specter of danger, seems sufficient reason to outlaw these outfits. It is, after all, a free -D country. But given the choice, I think I’ll stick with my great-aunt’s TV. —Lynne Harris  One need not dig far to find confirmation of just how tightly interwoven ultrasound, pregnancy, and consumption are in U.S. society today. With the advent of new D and D ultrasound devices capable of generating more visually appealing and “realistic” images, businesses have sprung up that market ultrasound scanning directly to the public, offering women the opportunity to view and acquire fetal ultrasound images on their own initiative and at their own expense, outside the purview of medical authority. Quite independent of the special interest that I take in ultrasound, I have several times chanced to come across glossy color advertisements bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ENTERTAINING FETUSES 145 for such “keepsake” ultrasound businesses in the course of my ordinary life. One such ad turned up in a copy of the free Northwest Parenting magazine that I happened to pick up, another in the program for a children’s theater production that I attended with my son, and another in a brochure I picked up at a local business called “Jump Planet, the Inflatable Party Center of the Universe!” to which my daughter had been invited for a friend’s birthday party. Had I not come across the topic in these other ways, I might have read about it in People magazine, which in June  featured an article that profiled one of the “chain stores” run by a franchise called Fetal Fotos, and reported on the controversies surrounding such businesses among ultrasound professionals (Schindehette and Finan ). Similar articles that address the rise of “keepsake” ultrasound enterprises have appeared in a number of local and national newspapers (see, e.g., Harris ; Hughes ; Lubell ; Ostrom ). In this chapter I examine “entertainment” ultrasound businesses as a phenomenon that manifests, in a particularly striking manner, some of the ambiguities and simmering tensions that surround the practice of obstetrical ultrasound in this country. These businesses are controversial because they situate what most understand to be a medical technology and procedure squarely in the marketplace and outside the medical domain. In doing so, they are hardly unique. From “concierge medicine,” to elective plastic surgery, to direct-to-consumer television ads for pharmaceuticals, to medical tourism, the commodification of medicine is more the rule than the exception. The “crisis of the uninsured” remains a perpetual crisis , year after year, because U.S. society is presently committed to solving health problems through marketplace solutions, however demonstrably these fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged. Thus, pharmacies become the “doctors” to the poor, nurses compete with local doctors for “continuing care patients” in low-cost clinics located in Wal-Mart stores (Bowe ), and nearly a third of the population suffers from untreated tooth decay, even as dentists work fewer and fewer hours for higher and higher salaries serving those with means (Berenson ; Sered and Fernandopulle ). That obstetrical ultrasound too gets drawn into the marketplace is not particularly surprising. What is more interesting, because less obvious, is how all of this relates to the politics of reproduction. As this chapter shall show, the closer we look at the debates and practices PUBLIC LIFE OF THE FETAL SONOGRAM 146 surrounding “entertainment” ultrasound, the more clear it becomes how the problematic nexus of medicine and consumerism has, in very concrete ways, created the conditions of possibility for ultrasound technology to become involved in some of the peculiarly American cultural politics of abortion. Troubling Medical Boundaries As one might expect, given the discussion of policies regarding ultrasound...