I could have delivered. It sounded like strange, barbaric torture to hold this tiny object in my arms. But now I understand why many women choose to deliver the fetus. Instead I wish to complicate the relative political silence of the feminist left on the complexity of the fetus, as image and as infant. This statement ignores the very history of genre conventions upon which sonograms build their claims to medical fact.
Images ARE real, insofar as they offer pleasure, cause pain, and incite viewers to action.
Women, especially, ignore this crucial lesson in aesthetics at their political and medical peril. Certainly representation is not reality, but as Susan Bordo says, Attempts to devalue fetal life have fed powerfully into the right-wing imagination of a possible world in which women would be callously and casually scraping fetuses out of their bodies like leftovers off a plate. The relationship between technology and biology becomes the relationship between mother and child. I bonded with an image, I aborted an image, and I deeply mourn an image. The image does not supersede the material presence of a pregnancy, it mediates, interprets, and supports the physical presence of an unborn child.