Document is current

Article History

Accepted: 9 December 2024

First Online: 15 January 2025

Declarations

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: N/A.

: N/A.

: The author declares no competing interests.

: 1 Feminist scholarship on the visualized fetus is extensive. See, as a starting point, Lisa M. Mitchell, Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (2001); Julie Roberts, The Visualised Foetus: A Cultural and Political Analysis of Ultrasound Imagery (2012); Janelle S. Taylor, The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction (2008).2 In this short article, I only have space to engage a few examples of the wide ranging feminist research and activism concerned with liberal rights and personhood, particularly in relation to reproduction. See the work of Laura Briggs, Jennifer C. Nash, Loretta Ross, Rickie Solinger, amongst many others, as an entry into these debates.3 In this article, I am engaging with discussions about pregnancy that coalesce around subjects that are interpellated as female. As such, when I use the term woman, it is not to suggest that only cisgender women become pregnant, but is necessary within the bounds of my argumentation.4 For my purposes here, I am using articles written and interviews given by the doctors who performed Glaswegian experiments in ultrasound. This is a stopgap measure in the development of this research. Contacting the NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde Archives in early 2023, I was told that their holdings, including the ultrasound papers that I wanted to see, had been moved out of their former location at the University of Glasgow Library and were currently inaccessible. At time of writing, this remains the case, and the archives do not yet have a new home. What I have at my disposal in the meantime is an abundance of first person narrative accounts from Donald and his colleagues, from which an impression of the women on whom these experiments were performed can be gleaned. In this short article, these women remain a sketch, white lines on an oscillator screen, their centrality to these experiments expressed as best I can; I hope future iterations of this work will be able to bring them further into focus. The ongoing inaccessibility of this archive puts the importance of this current work into relief: what methodological improvisations must be used when scholars become separated from our objects of study?