I attended a lecture while I was abroad in Melbourne about fetal politics, with the main thesis of the talk being that increased surveillance of pregnancy via ultrasound and via policing of pregnant women’s behaviors have priviliged the fetus over the mother.
Ultrasounds are now taken not only for medical purposes, but frequently also for emotional reasons like fostering a mother-child bond in utero or reassuring the mother that the child is, in fact, there and alive. You can even use a “personal doppler” to give yourself ultrasounds at home. Through the visualization provided by ultrasounds and 3D ultrasounds, the fetus becomes a person much sooner than birth- its gender is assigned. The woman thus becomes a Mother at the very start of pregnancy.
In the past several years, the policing of pregnant women has become a much bigger issue. There was an episode in season 5 of Law and Order:SVU about a woman who gets pregnant and has a drinking problem. Her ex-husband gets a court order to send her to rehab to protect the baby. If she drinks, basically, she gets thrown in jail.
That episode was based on real-life cases where pregnant women have been judged for drinking, smoking, or doing drugs while pregnant. The monitoring of “problem behaviors” in pregnant women – with the express intention of protecting the FETUS not the woman herself – has become a reality.
Perhaps in response, there has recently been a rise in popularity of “natural births” and the use of midwives and doulas instead of doctors in hospitals. It seems like pregnancy has become much more “medicalized,” and that pregnant women are surveilled under the guise of medicine- a “clinical gaze” that is still male as opposed to the usual “male gaze” to which other non-pregnant women are subjected.
