…we need to pray that many more ultrasounds will be used to open blind eyes and, more than this, soften hardened hearts.

One of the stranger articles you’ll read just dropped over at The Atlantic, normally a site of genuinely stimulating discussion. Moira Weigel’s “The Politics of Ultrasound” offers a kind of cultural history of the use of ultrasound machines. It also attempts to politicize ultrasounds, to unmask them as Pro-Life Hobgobblins, and thus to “ether” them, as folks say today.

For those not familiar with such devices, ultrasounds allow doctors to capture visual and aural projections of a baby—sometimes called a fetus—living in a mother’s womb. I’m a father three times over, and so I’m personally familiar with the miracle of ultrasounds. You see the baby squirming; you hear the baby’s heart beating; you and your spouse blink back tears at the miracle of life.

Or, if you’re a bit less idealistic, you question the entire idea of the ultrasound. That’s the unfortunate tact Weigel takes in her essay:

The idea would have been unthinkable before the advent of a technology developed in 1976: real-time ultrasound. At six weeks, the “heartbeat” is not audible; it is visible, a flickering that takes place between 120 and 160 times per minute on a black-and-white playback screen. As cardiac cells develop, they begin to send electrical pulses that cause their neighbors to contract. Scientists can observe the same effect if they culture cells in a petri dish.

This is already strange, and it gets stranger. Weigel goes on to portray the entire ultrasound experience as if it’s some kind of Technicolor Prenatal Magical Mystery Tour, with the “male doctor” presenting himself as some kind of Gandalf-like wizard, Lord of the Ultrasound:

These images produced a new and unprecedented vision of human development. Before ultrasound, medical care received by pregnant women had depended on their testimony, or how they described their own sensations. Ultrasound made it possible for the male doctor to evaluate the fetus without female interference. Ultrasound images carried the associations of objectivity typically accorded to the camera, and they conferred authority on the doctor who interpreted their contents. They seemed to give him immediate access to the tiny human floating inside his patient’s body. Of course, ultrasound technology has been a crucial component of prenatal care, too. Imagery obtained through ultrasound can alert doctors to potentially serious problems in a pregnancy—such as placental issues or congenital defects in the fetus.

You have to read this piece to believe it. (Women, for those wondering, represent about 46% of all physicians in training, per the WSJ, and women make up about 51% of all obstetricians and gynecologists. So the “male doctor” reference is a curious one.)

Let’s talk some turkey. I’m not unfamiliar with critiques of the pro-life movement. But this one takes the cake for sheer strangeness. The post-factual discussion of the ultrasound stands out. Among other matters, here’s what Weigel asserts is subjective, not objective:

• Heartbeat of the baby is “heartbeat” (air quotes!)
• The culturing of cells is just like a baby in a womb
• Ultrasounds are actually about gross men violating the privacy of women
• Ultrasound images merely carry “associations of objectivity”
• They falsely “confer authority” on the presiding attendant/doctor (who I guess is supposed to be always male?)

I have no prior reason to doubt Weigel’s ability to write and think clearly, but this is strange water. An ultrasound reports what is actually—like factually—happening in a woman’s body. People appreciate ultrasound machines for various reasons. Ultrasounds help tremendously, for example, when a woman wonders if she’s pregnant, or—in less happy circumstances—when she wonders if the baby growing in her, once kicking and spinning and happy, is still alive.

Ultrasounds have played an important role, yes, in opening many willfully-blind eyes to the humanity of a baby in the womb. If straightforward task performance is necessary politicization, then I suppose the ultrasound is politicized. But let us not stop there. Other standard medical devices must come in for questioning here. A wheelchair is not free of a political identity; it carries the association of objectivity in offering, at least purportedly, to transfer a post-operative patient to his or her room. Further, the wheelchair confers authority on the person pushing it; this is a false authority, but it is one that the “male wheelchair-pusher” believes is his birthright. It is a strange device, the wheelchair, and one should use it with extreme suspicion.

Kidding aside, this Atlantic piece shows why, as I have said elsewhere, abortion is the original “fake news.” People take an objective act, the termination of a living human being, and they throw some modern linguistic magic at it, and next thing you know it’s not a killing but care of a woman’s body. We’re in the age when truth is reported as fiction and fiction is reported as truth. Nowhere is American—and Western—society more prey to such deception than the issue of abortion.

We’re reminded by stranger-than-fiction pieces like this of the need of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, very truth himself, to tell the truth (John 14:6). To stand for it. To reach out in love to those blinded to it. We need to do all we can, through word and deed, to build a culture of life.

And we need to pray that many more ultrasounds will be used to open blind eyes and, more than this, soften hardened hearts.