Seeing, Feeling, Doing: Mandatory Ultrasound Laws, Empathy and Abortion (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ultrasound: A Window to the Womb?: Obstetric Ultrasound and the Abortion Rights Debate
Journal of Medical Humanities, 2000
This paper explores the rhetoric of obstetric ultrasound technology as it relates to the abortion debate, specifically the interpretation given to ultrasound images by opponents of abortion. The tenor of the anti-abortion approach is precisely captured in the videotape, Ultrasound: A Window to the Womb. Aspects of this videotape are analyzed in order to tease out the assumptions about the (female) body and about the access to truth yielded by scientific technology (ultrasound) held by militant opponents of abortion. It is argued that the ultrasound images do not offer transparent confirmation of the ontological status of the embryo and fetus. Rather, the "window" of ultrasound is constructed through a complex combination of visual and verbal devices: ultrasound images, photographic images, verbal argument, and emotional appeal.
Visualising abortion: emotion discourse and fetal imagery in a contemporary abortion debate
Social Science & Medicine, 2005
This paper presents an analysis of a recent UK anti-abortion campaign in which the use of fetal imagery--especially images of fetal remains--was a prominent issue. A striking feature of the texts produced by the group behind the campaign was the emphasis given to the emotions of those viewing such imagery. Traditionally, social scientific analyses of mass communication have problematised references to emotion and viewed them as being of significance because of their power to subvert the rational appraisal of message content. However, we argue that emotion discourse may be analysed from a different perspective. As the categorisation of the fetus is a social choice and contested, it follows that all protagonists in the abortion debate (whether pro- or anti-abortion) are faced with the task of constructing the fetus as a particular entity rather than another, and that they must seek to portray their preferred categorisation as objective and driven by an 'out-there' reality. Following this logic, we show how the emotional experience of viewing fetal imagery was represented so as to ground an anti-abortion construction of the fetus as objective. We also show how the arguments of the (pro-abortion) opposition were construed as totally discrepant with such emotions and so were invalidated as deceitful distortions of reality. The wider significance of this analysis for social scientific analyses of the abortion debate is discussed.
Making Fetal Persons: Fetal Homicide, Ultrasound, and the Normative Significance of Birth
Philosophia: A Journal of Continental Feminism, 2014
The task of this paper is to examine the integration of obstetric ultrasound images in moral and legal debates on the status of the human fetus, particularly through the framework of the constitution of fetal personhood. I focus on the questions about the moral and legal significance of prenatal life and birth as construed through recent shifts in law toward so-called ‘fetal homicide’ laws. Throughout, I argue that the moral status of the fetus has a performative dimension, realised in the operation of obstetric ultrasound and the interpolation of the fetus as a person that it effects. As I show, in regard to the constitution of the fetus as person, obstetric ultrasound operates as a technological means of mediation between the human body and the concept of the person.
Fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction
Feminist Studies, 1987
Now chimes the glass, a note of sweetest strength, It clouds, it clears, my utmost hope it proves, For there my longing eyes behold at length A dapper form, that lives and breathes and moves. Goethe, Faust (Ultimately) the world of "being" can function to the exclusion of the mother. No need for mother-provided that there is something of the maternal: and it is the father then who acts as-is-the mother. Either the woman is passive; or she doesn't exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of. She does not enter into the oppositions, she is not coupled with the father (who is coupled with the son). He1'ne Cixous, Sorties In the mid-1980s, with the United States Congress still deadlocked over the abortion issue and the Supreme Court having twice reaffirmed "a woman's right to choose,"' the political attack on abortion rights moved further into the terrain of mass culture and imagery. Not that the "prolife movement" has abandoned conventional political arenas; rather, its defeats there have hardened its commitment to a more long-term ideological struggle over the symbolic meanings of fetuses, dead or alive. Antiabortionists in both the United States and Britain have long applied the principle that a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words. Chaste silhouettes of the fetal form, or voyeuristicnecrophilic photographs of its remains, litter the background of Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987). ? 1987 by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky 263 264 Rosalind Pollack Petchesky any abortion talk. These still images float like spirits through the courtrooms, where lawyers argue that fetuses can claim tort liability; through the hospitals and clinics, where physicians welcome them as "patients"; and in front of all the abortion centers, legislative committees, bus terminals, and other places that "right-to-lifers" haunt. The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain. Beginning with the 1984 presidential campaign, the neoconservative Reagan administration and the Christian Right accelerated their use of television and video imagery to capture political discourseand power.2 Along with a new series of "Ron and Nancy" commercials, the Reverend Pat Robertson's "700 Club" (a kind of right-wing talk show), and a resurgence of Good versus Evil kiddie cartoons, American television and video viewers were bombarded with the newest "prolife" propaganda piece, The Silent Scream. The Silent Scream marked a dramatic shift in the contest over abortion imagery. With formidable cunning, it translated the still and by-now stale images of fetus as "baby" into real-time video, thus (1) giving those images an immediate interface with the electronic media; (2) transforming antiabortion rhetoric from a mainly religious/mystical to a medical/technological mode; and (3) bringing the fetal image "to life." On major network television the fetus rose to instant stardom, as The Silent Scream and its impresario, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, were aired at least five different times in one month, and one well-known reporter, holding up a fetus in a jar before 10 million viewers, announced: "This thing being aborted, this potential person, sure looks like a baby!" This statement is more than just propaganda; it encapsulates the "politics of style" dominating late capitalist culture, transforming "surface impressions" into the "whole message."3 The cult of appearances not only is the defining characteristic of national politics in the United States, but it is also nourished by the language and techniques of photo/video imagery. Aware of cultural trends, the current leadership of the antiabortion movement has made a conscious strategic shift from religious discourses and authorities to medicotechnical ones, in its effort to win over the courts, the
Feminism and Psychology, 2017
Obstetric ultrasound is key to opposing ways of valuing foetuses, that is, both to the ascription of foetal personhood and to foetal selection and termination of pregnancy. Whilst ultrasound images are increasingly common within the public sphere there has been relatively little public discussion of its role in identifying actual or potential foetal anomaly and the consequences of this. This paper examines how professionals working with obstetric ultrasound encounter, navigate and make sense of the different uses of this technology. Professionals commonly delineate their work (as providing information) from women’s autonomous choices. Emphasising “women’s choice” can obscure consideration of different collective ways of valuing foetuses with anomalies. It can also deflect consideration of the fundamentally ambiguous information that ultrasound can produce. Distinguishing information from choice is underpinned by a questionable fact–value distinction. We describe alternate professional practices which involve questioning these binaries and foregrounding clinicians’ responsibilities for women’s current and future experience. Public discussion of ultrasound’s different roles in valuing foetuses would be enriched if the discourses and practices shaping professionals’ attempts to facilitate ethical decision-making were included for collective consideration.
A Woman's "Right to Know"?: Forced Ultrasound Measures as an Intervention of Biopower
This article examines the recent introduction of forced ultrasound-beforeabortion measures in select U.S. states as an intervention of gendered biopower. These measures are drafted based on model legislation entitled the Woman's Right to Know Act. Such legislation exploits a discourse of women's health, but invests in fetal "life" by regulating the behavior of pregnant women so as to promote the carrying of pregnancies to term; the legislation also represents childbirth and motherhood as in the interest of women's health. Ultimately, I contend that Right to Know measures give the state permission to override the choices, rights, and interests of the population of pregnant women as a whole in an attempt to "protect" and optimize a supposedly vulnerable fetal population.
2020
In this article we investigate the situation of pre-abortion ultrasound examination in a context of illegality, attending to the discursive practices of professionals who mediate viewing experiences, from the perspective of the experiences and interpretive repertoires of young women who were submitted to the examination. In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 women who had an abortion in the university period and who did a pre-abortion ultrasound. The material was transcribed and analyzed from the interpretive paradigm. Abortion is ignored in the examination situation through a particular discursive practice of professionals around the personification of the fetus and the naturalization of the maternal-fetal bond. The examination encourages the woman to see and meet the fetus, while she rejects the invitation to participate in the visualization. This women do not produce the hegemonic or dominant link between images, languages, and emotions that would make them mothers, but neither do they produce an alternative link that allows them to experience ultrasound consistent with the decision to interrupt the pregnancy. In this way, the ultrasound situation translates into an experience of normative violence for women.
Quietly Conscious: A Discussion of Fetal Personhood and Abortion
2017
Roe vs. Wade was an important victory for American feminists on January 22, 1973; abortion was made legal before the confirmation of fetal viability, and a woman's right to privacy was upheld. But the underlying battle to define the value of human life has been around since the 1 st chapter of history books. Though Ancient Rome saw abortion as an acceptable way to end unwanted pregnancy, a fetus in Ancient Persia was seen as a valuable life, the government taking many measures to prevent unplanned pregnancies and help the mothers who found themselves in difficult situations (Yarmohammadi, Zargaran, Vatanpour, Abedini, Adhami, 2013, pp. 293-296). Currently, the debate for life has maintained its momentum and is as relevant a discussion in our local community as it was back in the Ancient world and the D.C. Courtroom. For the year 2013, Fredericksburg City reported a total live birth amount of 417 matched to a total of 304 abortions ("Health Profile, Fredericksburg City, 2013," 2015). That is, the number of abortions amounted to nearly 73% of live births. I believe that abortion is a life ending procedure that discards the most vulnerable of the world, and though unable to be independent outside the womb, during pregnancy an embryo experiences pain, is the victim of profiling, and may be more human than ever considered before. As humans, one of our noblest instincts is the need to help an innocent being dealing with a great amount of pain. In "Locating the Beginnings of Pain," Steve Derbyshire (1999) theorized that after realistically reviewing scientific data, the development of a fetus is not advanced enough, either consciously or neurologically, to fully experience the feeling of pain, even after birth (p.30). Written as a counterargument to Derbyshire's article, David Benatar's and Michael Benatar's (2001) "A Pain in the Fetus: Toward Ending Confusion about Fetal Pain" argued that by reexamining fetal neural anatomy, the reactions of certain organs to stimuli, and the
Phenomenology of pregnancy and the ethics of abortion
Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy, 2018
In this article I investigate the ways in which phenomenology could guide our views on the rights and/or wrongs of abortion. To my knowledge very few phenomenologists have directed their attention toward this issue, although quite a few have strived to better understand and articulate the strongly related themes of pregnancy and birth, most often in the context of feminist philosophy. After introducing the ethical and political contemporary debate concerning abortion, I introduce phenomenology in the context of medicine and the way phenomenologists have understood the human body to be lived and experienced by its owner. I then turn to the issue of pregnancy and discuss how the embryo or foetus could appear for us, particularly from the perspective of the pregnant woman, and what such showing up may mean from an ethical perspective. The way medical technology has changed the experience of pregnancy – for the pregnant woman as well as for the father and/or other close ones – is discussed, particularly the implementation of early obstetric ultra-sound screening and blood tests (NIPT) for Down’s syndrome and other medical defects. I conclude the article by suggesting that phenomenology can help us to negotiate an upper time limit for legal abortion and, also, provide ways to determine what embryo-foetus defects to look for and in which cases these should be looked upon as good reasons for performing an abortion. Keywords: ethics of abortion; phenomenology; lived body; pregnancy; obstetric ultrasound; quickening; NIPT
Technology and the Legal Discourse of Fetal Autonomy
UCLA Women's LJ, 1997
48 UCLA WOMEN'S LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 8:47 3. Fetal Images: the Abortion Debate and Popular Culture 65 C. Individuality and Rights 67 III. The Fetus in Law 69 A. Penalties for Causing the Death of a Fetus: Early Views 70 B. Anglo-American Common Law of Fetal Death. 73 C. ...