Only the doctor’s confirmation and the name stamped on the image work to assure that that doomed bicuspid, that gall bladder, that fetus, that tumor is their own. The image itself can hardly seem like it depicts your body, when you’ve come to know your body always from the exterior, in four dimensions, simultaneous with the other senses, from a high angle ...
Getting the sonogram of the baby-to-be is fairly common, I think. I’ve received plenty of them, along with an excited word or two from the potential parent or grandparent. In the culture at large they are passed around at work, pinned to refrigerator doors, archived in photo-albums, used in television and print ads, sent in mass e-mails from friends and family, even screen printed on t-shirts (appalling in both concept and execution). Lately, the personal sonogram machine has become a must-have. Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise bought their own to monitor the development of their child, presumably as often as they wanted. The TomKat example notwithstanding, sonogram images are enormously popular.
In reading a little bit about them I found out that they are not especially crucial diagnostic tools for monitoring normal pregnancies, despite how common it is for women to have them taken, and taken often during pregnancy. It seems obvious that because they are so common and because they are not medically useful commensurate with their frequency and reverence, the sonogram speaks to desires and uses beyond the medical or scientific. Before the arrival of an actual baby, the image serves as a placeholder, a concrete image and a physical object on which to pin hopes and expectations that were far more nebulous for parents living before the arrival of imaging technology that sees inside the body (and, of course, after a time when it was culturally possible to greet a pregnancy with hopeful expectation). It also serves as a powerful, because concrete and scientific, confirmation of pregnancy – proof to the woman who may not yet feel anything different that she is, in fact, with child. In some ways it may even be the mark of a “good mother,” evidence of her concern, her attention, and her ability to procure advanced medical technology.
In practice, the sonogram has very quickly become the baby’s first picture. It’s commonplace enough in our culture to be missed when unavailable. For the person who made the sonogram image that reveals not a fetus but a map of China, the absence of a sonogram for an adopted daughter was felt strongly enough to create something to take its place.
(This is the website it comes from. Warning: There’s music.)
From the personal, emotional connections many individuals feel for the sonogram of a particular fetus, the generic sonogram image gets mobilized for commercial and political uses. Because it taps into all the feelings associated with parenthood, it works for advertisers who want to stress a product’s safety features as it did in one Volvo ad. Because it has worked so well to extend personhood back even further in human development (there was a time when even walking, talking children weren’t thought of as actual people … for some of us, this still holds true), it works for anti-abortion activists who want the general acceptance and legally enforced recognition of their belief that an individual human life, with sovereign rights, begins at conception. It's for this last reason I greet all sonograms with a bit of trepidation, despite the happiness I might feel for those who send them.
I’m more or less prepared to think all of these things when a sonogram arrives in the in-box attended by the words “meet so-and-so.” Not so when the image a friend sends is an MRI of a fairly significantly sized tumor. Granted, it’s not commonplace to take home this kind of medical image, at least not yet. So there is a general unpreparedness at work here. But the idea of having a picture of a tumor at first struck me as worrying, and of a kind of worry that I took as separate from my concern for my friend. The picture of an active tumor seems to trade in a bit of what the extraneous teeth, kidney stones, and pickled appendices that make it home do. It’s both frightening and fascinating. (And that may be at the core of my, ultimately self-centered, squeamishness. Will she think I’m concerned for her if I’m so interested in the picture of what’s hurting her?) The reason, I think, those little post-op bits of the body come home after surgery, though, is to serve not primarily as curiosities but as souvenirs and, quite possibly, as trophies — as reminders of a condition that is passed, as monuments to the victorious. Having the picture while knowing the devious thing is still inside, the picture isn't yet a souvenir or a trophy. It’s only a potential one, and in that, it’s nothing but good. Like the sonogram, it’s a placeholder, just for a different set of hopes and expectations.
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