Abstract
Feminist scholarship has demonstrated the importance of sustained critical engagement with ultrasound visualizations of pregnant women’s bodies. In response to portrayals of these images as “objective” forms of knowledge about the fetus, it has drawn attention to the social practices through which the meanings of ultrasound are produced. This article makes a novel contribution to this project by addressing an empirical context that has been neglected in the existing feminist literature concerning ultrasound, namely, its use during pregnancies that women decide to terminate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with women concerning their experiences of abortion in England, I explore how the meanings of having an ultrasound prior to terminating a pregnancy are discursively constructed. I argue that women’s accounts complicate dominant representations of ultrasound and that in so doing, they multiply the subject positions available to pregnant women.
Highlights
Feminist scholarship has demonstrated the importance of sustained critical engagement with ultrasound visualizations of pregnant women’s bodies
Feminist scholarship has mapped and deconstructed anti-abortion claims that ultrasound images of pregnancy provide “objective” evidence of fetal personhood
This article contributes to this project by exploring the discursive practices through which women in England construct the experience of having an ultrasound prior to abortion
Summary
The analysis presented here is drawn from 23 semi-structured interviews that were conducted as part of a broader study that explored women’s experiences of abortion in England. These combined strategies produced a sample of 28 women (17 of whom were recruited via clinics and 11 of whom were recruited via external ads) Of these participants, 23 described having an ultrasound as part of their experience of abortion; their accounts form the focus of this article. The time elapsed between participants’ abortions and their interviews ranged from approximately 3 weeks to 13 years This means that those who took part in the study had very different opportunities to reflect upon their encounters with ultrasound prior to being interviewed. Four women described having an ultrasound during prenatal care In three cases, this was because they had originally planned to carry their pregnancies to term, but their circumstances changed during pregnancy (for one participant, this occurred when a lethal fetal condition was diagnosed during the scan). In identifying the interpretative repertoires that women draw upon to describe pre-abortion ultrasound, my aim is to understand what it “is possible to say” (Edley 2001, 201) about this experience
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