Ethical dilemmas on “ultrasound bond”: Technology and pregnant embodiment

As Young states, some conceptualizations and practices of medicine seem to alienate the pregnant subject from her bodily experience. Nowadays the use of the ultrasound technique in pregnancy has become a routine practice, especially because early fetal images encourage the maternal emotional relationship to the fetus. Thus, the aim of this paper is to survey the extant literature in order to clarify whether ultrasounds actually encourage the maternal bond to the fetus, to make explicit what kind of bond ultrasounds are really able to produce, and finally to discuss the repercussion on the position of women in the process of redefinition of pregnancy as a biomedical event. Indeed, the boom of ultrasound in obstetric practice seems to have encouraged the spread of a vision of gestation as an event belonging only to the fetus. Thus, the center of the screen becomes the only center of the reproductive process and “foetality” becomes the real synonymous of procreation. In this light, ultrasound technology seems to implement an individualistic vision of the subject and its future, as it separates the fetus from its mother and to cooperate to create a disembodied culture of gestation and procreation where the “maternal fragility” is completely ignored.