The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media

Abstract

O nce restricted to the privacy of the doctor’s office, ultrasound images of the fetus are now immediately recognizable in the public arena. They are commonplace in advertising and socialmedia, fromprovocative antichoice billboards featuring fetal imagery to Facebook posts tagged “baby’s first pic.” These depictions of the fetus in utero have become iconic and are arguably the most easily recognizedmedical image. How andwhy did this happen?And atwhat price and to what end? This article takes a longue durée historical approach to these questions and explores the complex evolution of the fetal image inWestern Christian culture from the late Middle Ages to the present. We show that before images of the fetus in utero entered the digital age, they had been curated and deployed in three distinctive ways over the past fivehundredyears. The resulting images fed into andwere theproducts of changing approaches to “reproduction.” We understand “reproduction” as both an embodied medical phenomenon and a material technique of image reproduction. Against the backdrop of evolving obstetri-