Abstracts Anthropology

Making babies: Routine ultrasound imaging and the cultural construction of the fetus in Montreal, Canada

by Lisa Meryn Mitchell

In this dissertation I investigate how prenatal ultrasound images are interpreted as representations of fetal selves by sonographers and by pregnant women at one hospital in Montreal, Canada. In conventional studies, ultrasound is regarded as a neutral and passive technology, a window on to the fetus. In contrast, some critics of ultrasound argue that fetal imaging is a form of social control through which Biomedicine imposes a particular notion of fetal selfhood upon women. I critique both these approaches by focusing on the multifaceted process through which ultrasound fetal images become meaningful for sonographers and for women. Using the literature on ultrasound's technical development, routinization in obstetrical practice, and professional organization, I show how ultrasound echoes have come to be taken for granted as a window on to the fetus. I examine sonographers' interpretations of the ultrasound image for expectant parents and identify how notions of fetal selves (embodied, subjective, conscious, acting, and entailing certain rights and obligations) are central to this process of "showing the baby." I situate the sonographers' interpretations within their local institutional context and within current obstetrical beliefs about the fetus. Drawing from multiple interviews with pregnant women from before the first ultrasound to post-partum, I show how women's accounts of the fetus reproduce cultural assumptions about nurturing, selfless mothers and active, conscious and sentient fetal selves. I suggest that ultrasound provides women with a means of particularizing and personalizing the fetus by assigning a physical appearance, gender, character and family resemblance. I conclude by arguing that the meaning which ultrasound images hold for women and the extent to which those images inform their behaviour toward the fetus is neither inherent in the technology nor created by sonographers' explanations of the image. Instead, ultrasound fetal images have transitory, complex, and often ambiguous meanings, temporary combinations of assumptions and emotions, structured by existing cultural idioms, institutional agendas, personal histories and relationships of power, dependence and authority