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One of the most common issues that comes up online from pregnant mothers who are interested in natural birth, free birth, unassisted birth (and birth), is ultrasound.  I have written about ultrasound quite a bit in the past (here and here) and anyone who has spent any time here is probably familiar with my personal perspective.

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I am of the conviction that ultrasound is harmful, and that its risks far outweigh its benefits, which are minimal.  Ultrasound is a poor method of assessing fluid levels, and it is a poor method of assessing the size/weight of the baby.  Performing an ultrasound at 18 weeks gestation and then informing the mother that her placenta is “low-lying” is ridiculous and nonsensical and betrays a lack of understand of the physiology of birth, and yet docs do this all the time. yada yada yada.  I even bore myself, I’ve been repeating this for so long.

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What ultrasound is very good at, is reinforcing the notion that it is the professional who occupies a position of authority over the pregnancy, the status of the baby, and the mother’s confidence.  Ultrasound perpetuates the lie that it is possible for *anyone* to accurately assess the health of a child in utero, or to predict the process or outcome of a birth.  I hear and read on a weekly basis that another mother is relieved at finding from the ultrasound that “Baby is healthy and perfect! Yay!”  It is misleading for doctors to tell their patients that their babies are well, from an ultrasound image.  They don’t know—but of course, it is a safe prediction, because the vast majority of babies born in the wealthy industrial world are well simply because birth is very safe, and the odds are that your kid is going to be fine.

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Ultrasound often scares mothers who have nothing to worry about, and falsely assuages the fears of mothers who may go on to give birth to babies  who *do* have serious issues that were not detected via ultrasound. Billions of dollars have been invested in the ultrasound machine in every hospital, and its use, upkeep, staff, and infrastructure moves billions of dollars around the medical industry.

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Whenever I write a post or an article in which I discuss my misgivings about ultrasound, I receive at least a few messages from mothers whose babies did have problems that were detected via ultrasound, or mothers whose babies would have died had they not received ultrasound, or mothers who felt safer and happier “knowing” that their babies were fine, thanks to ultrasound.  It is difficult for me to navigate these responses, because it is really none of my business to comment on the choices of others, and I have no problem whatsoever with the reality  that other mothers are different than I am.  The facts remain:  ultrasound does not statistically improve outcomes, ultrasound does affect and change the growth of human cells, and we do not know the long-term multi-generational effect of ultrasound exposure, or what the cumulative genetic effects of ultrasound might be.

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And yet, when mothers question or decline ultrasound, they are treated in large part by OBs as reckless tinfoil hat-wearing nutters.  What if doctors told the truth about ultrasound?  What if they offered ultrasound to their patients saying, “We could give you an ultrasound, but this won’t improve the chances that your baby is healthy, and if we do detect an abnormality there is probably not much we can do about it until your baby is born, and we don’t really know what the ultrasound might do to your baby’s DNA, or what kind of subtle changes in your baby’s development the ultrasound might catalyze, but we do know that ultrasound changes and damages cells, and that’s why we use it to destroy cancerous tumours.  Whaddya say?”  If ultrasound were presented with some stark honesty on the part of physicians, I think fewer mothers would choose ultrasound.  Why would a mother derive comfort from a procedure if her doctor is upfront about that comfort being only symbolic?

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The point of all this is that I have started to notice that the polarized views of so many of the choices that we make around pregnancy and birth (from ultrasound to vaccination) are not so much to do with envy and competition or a desire to be right (as the dismissive term “mommy wars” suggests), but rather that the decisions we make around these issues comes down to the fundamental approach to life that underpins our individual world views.  When another mother tells me that she is grateful to have received the ultrasound that diagnosed a problem (no matter that the problem couldn’t be addressed during the pregnancy) because she was then able to prepare for {hospital birth, emergency services on-hand, possibly a surgical birth scheduled in advance, etc.], my response is that I feel grateful to have foregone ultrasound for the opposite reason:  *Especially* if my child is to be born with some serious problems, I want to discover this at the moment of birth, myself.  *Especially* if my child is to be born with some serious problems, I want that birth to take place at home.  For safety reasons. Let me reiterate that I am confident that objectively, the odds are in my favour for having a healthy child (and clearly I have a strong point). But even for the most medically-minded individual, aren’t there nuances and complicating factors even within the paradigm of intervention?  Isn’t “safety”, for all of us, a complicated matter? Subjective, and tainted by our pasts and perspectives, always. This is, I realize, considered an extreme view, but I will always uphold and exercise my right to have my life unfold according to my own, probably conflicting, probably irrational tenets of what it means to be human, and animal, and real and electrified by the inherently dangerous, deadly business of living.

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In a recent CBC radio Ideas episode, Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harrari points out that death will (or has already) become simply a technical problem, that science and technology will, eventually, succeed in solving.  As the world careens closer to a technocratic state, and as my own newsfeed is increasingly dominated by stories of women forced to undergo surgical birth, or women denied legal representation for criminal assault during birth (thanks, essentially, to the position of supremacy that physicians hold in our culture) I feel even more compelled to openly state that I have a right to pain, and sadness and failure.  I have a right to death.  What becomes of us if we are forced to choose between subservience or death?  or between indignity or death? or between a cyborg-state or death? The right to bodily integrity  has to include the right to make choices that are both informed and uninformed, safe and unsafe, approved of, and scorned.  Like every other mother, I would do anything to protect, save, and heal my children if they are sick or compromised.  I am so thankful for their good health, because it is not only in the areas of childbirth that Modern Medicine demands compliance, subservience and dehumanization.