Higher Risk, Better Pictures: When Knowing More About Your Fetus Means Getting to Know Baby

• In Event: 4163 - Social Dimensions of Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

Besides serving as the clinical bedrock of prenatal care, fetal ultrasounds in the United States are a social ritual. Providers and parents collaborate to create a scene of “bonding” to the fetal image, enhanced by life-like advancements in 3D and 4D ultrasound technology. Women that are “low-risk” have one or two ultrasounds and basic screening, viewing prenatal care as medically reassuring and an opportunity to see “baby’s first picture.” Although providers ultimately deploy these technologies in search of fetal anomalies or distress, the blending of social and medical is unproblematic in low-risk pregnancy situations. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews from a maternal-fetal medicine clinic serving women of high socioeconomic status, I examine the consequences of this hybrid meaning of prenatal technologies within the context of high-risk reproductive decision-making. Elevated risk sets in motion a knowledge imperative, whereby most women choose based on physician recommendations to have as much prenatal testing as possible throughout pregnancy. The more “at risk” physicians believe a pregnancy is, the greater the surveillance—the highest risk patients in this study have up to three ultrasounds a week. Therefore, “knowing more” about their fetuses results in expectant parents “getting to know” their babies. And paradoxically, patients at the highest risk for fetal demise, miscarriage, anomalies, and facing difficult decisions are precisely those that “get to know” their babies the best. I outline how prenatal testing technologies coalesce to create a vivid social birth that precedes biological birth, precisely for those births that are most at risk.

Author

• Eleni Skaperdas, University of California Los Angeles