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Celebrating ultrasound?

We save stamps in our office, for a charity that uses them for fundraising. As I was retrieving some stamps this morning, I cam across a new one I hadn’t seen before. It is obviously part of a series called “Australian Innovations”, and it carries the picture of a headless pregnant woman and the message “Ultrasound Imaging Equipment 1976".

I don’t know that Australia can lay claim to this innovation, as this stamp seems to imply, but it is interesting to think how ubiquitous this technology has become in maternity care over the last 30 years. It seems that every woman today has her pictures for the baby album, proudly taken before the child was even born. She may already know its sex and details of its health, which may or may not help her to prepare for the arrival of the baby.

There are fewer handicapped babies born these days, due to elective terminations of pregnancy. This has implications for our society in any ways, including reduced burdens of care for families and expensive health care support for the community. It may also alter the way we accept each other, adding emphasis to the perception that everyone must be “beautiful” and conform to some predetermined perception of what is acceptable in appearance and functionality in our society.

Ultrasound has also altered the way pregnancy is managed, with “due dates” forming the basis for the entire pregnancy management program. Millions of women are induced every day, because according to the ultrasound scan, they are “overdue”. Thus they join the cascade of intervention that inevitably unfolds, often at great detriment to themselves and their babies. Nothing much is left to chance and Nature these days!

Ultrasound has certainly opened up a whole new world. For those who would like to know more about the implications of ultrasound scanning on the unborn, the book Ultrasound Unsound is a good place to start.Who would have predicted that a technology, originally developed for use in submarines, would have such huge implications for the future of our society?

Posted by andrea at June 03, 2005 12:02 PM