“How Ultrasound Became Political” is a bizarre, SJW piece in The Atlantic written by Moira Weigel (ahem).
Now, one can find potentially valid arguments for not agreeing with Steve King’s recently introduced “Heartbeat Protection Act”, but Weigel’s piece is… just bizarre.
These images produced a new and unprecedented vision of human development. Before ultrasound, medical care received by pregnant women had depended on their testimony, or how they described their own sensations. Ultrasound made it possible for the male doctor to evaluate the fetus without female interference. Ultrasound images carried the associations of objectivity typically accorded to the camera, and they conferred authority on the doctor who interpreted their contents. They seemed to give him immediate access to the tiny human floating inside his patient’s body…
Why ‘male doctor’ only? I smell someone who hates men…
Weigel then cites the film 2001: A Space Odyssey to… make some sort of point:
But the image of the fetus as a tiny “spaceman” remained lodged in the popular consciousness. Stanley Kubrick helped make it iconic with his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which concludes with a sequence featuring a “Star Child” floating through space, a direct citation of Nilsson’s photographs.
Critics have offered varying interpretations of the sequence. It is an allegory about how technology will destroy the human race; it is an allegory about how we will be reborn through technology. What was clear, as the Star Child floated in its tiny, incandescent amniotic sac, was the suggestion that he floated in a void. The framing of the ultrasound image was notable for what it excluded: the woman. In order to make the fetus visible, it made her disappear.
Ah yes, ultrasound and the ethics of abortion as a war on women.
Basically, insofar as ultrasound displays objective qualities and behavior patterns of a developing fetus/baby, it tends to sway the expectant mother (and others in society) that, at point X in the gestation period, a fetus/baby ought to be demarcated as having natural rights as an autonomous human being.
And this makes radicals like Weigel very upset.
Sean Davis has more here.
