"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" It's the last defense of cheating husbands, Donald Trump's press secretary, and a strange piece in the Atlantic, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea that a Fetus Is a Person” (this title, originally attached to the piece, was altered after publication). If a face, a gesture, or the flutter of a heartbeat engenders empathy in a doctor or a parent, warns author Moira Weigel, that empathy should be squelched. The humanity a sonogram seems to convey is only an optical illusion.
Weigel is wary of an ultrasound's ability to undermine a woman's individual choice and refute her understanding of her own pregnancy. This worry isn't as farfetched as it might sound. Consider the checkered history of doctors' attempts to interpret women's bodies: The Halsted mastectomy mutilated women without protecting them from breast cancer, as the inventor brushed off women's concerns and questions; and doctors still frequently dismiss women's descriptions of pain as hysteria, offering weaker medication than they prescribe to men with comparable conditions.
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