Barbara Sumner Burstyn: The window into the womb now opens even earlier

It was bound to happen. Now even the womb has succumbed to the marketplace. In Canada, the first entertainment ultrasound business has opened. 4-D ultrasound provides a realistic picture of your baby before it is born.

No more blurry images of the traditional ultrasound. The stills and live-action video generated are often clear enough to evaluate subtle facial features and to judge who the baby resembles.

4-D ultrasound was used sparingly for diagnostic purposes in high-risk pregnancies. It hasn't taken long for it to metamorphose into a business opportunity. If nothing else, its promotion is an example of how medicine is increasingly at the service of sales and marketing departments.

The American makers, General Electric, are marketing it not just to doctors but directly to the consumer. In the United States it runs prime-time commercials featuring well-dressed, teary-eyed parents gazing at their nearly full-term baby floating in the womb accompanied by the ballad The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

Obstetricians, keen to maximise their revenue streams, have been advertising "Come See Your Baby for $150".

Meanwhile, new software designed to accompany the 4-D ultrasound allows expectant parents a simulated, virtual feel of their foetus while watching the monitor.

In Canada, the technician who has set up the first private clinic calls her service "bonding" ultrasound. She offers gift certificates and says it would make a great baby shower present.

"It's amazing," she said in a recent interview, "until you get the baby, you can't believe it's real."

Pardon? In my time, the morning sickness, protruding belly and kicking baby were enough to alert parents to the reality of their child. And as for bonding, that was traditionally the process that happened after your child was born.

It was part of an initiation that enabled you to realise the inescapable reality of a child and the end to your previous please-yourself life. Obviously parenting has changed greatly. Now that bonding process is often cut short - by the quick return to the workforce and the arrival of caregivers.

So rather than pushing back the tide of encroachment into a new mother's bonding time with her infant, technology has instead encroached on a baby's final weeks of blissful privacy. Aside from the remarkable thought that today's instant-gratification generation may be better able to bond with their children via predigested technology, turning their pregnancy into little more than the latest reality TV show, the real issue is the ultrasound's usefulness to anti-abortionists.

In North Carolina, a Christian-run crisis pregnancy centre has bought a 4-D ultrasound machine as a "window to the womb", offering to scan "abortion-vulnerable" women in their first trimester.

Supporters of the technology say the US$120,000 ($205,000) machines should be in every pregnancy help centre, and some are pushing for a law that requires every pregnant woman seeking an abortion to view this image of her baby.

This despite the fact that the ultrasound images that are proving so emotive are of almost full-term babies, while nine out of 10 abortions are within the first trimester, many months before the foetus is recognisable, let alone viable.

In the hands of anti-abortionists, the 4-D technology is a cynical and manipulative tool that reduces the abortion quandary to a strip of black-and-white footage, while further distorting the reasons many women seek abortion.

There is no doubt this latest piece of technology will be at the forefront of the anti-abortion crusade, a key tool for neo-conservatives intent on overturning 30 years of reproductive rights.

Carol Moseley Braun, a former ambassador to New Zealand, says that if George W. Bush is re-elected, within six years all affirmative action will be gone, including the hard-won right to safe, legal, controlled abortion.

And certainly proponents of foetal rights are on a roll. Last month the US passed the misleading and emotively named Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

Countless commentators have noted that the bill was fuelled by misinformation and inaccurate and inflammatory rhetoric. The measure callously disregards women's health, removing their needs entirely in favour of a radical anti-choice agenda.

In one extreme case, anti-abortionists are seeking to appoint a guardian for a 5-month-old foetus of a mentally retarded Florida woman, made pregnant by rape.

A group of pro-choice organisations say that if a third party is allowed to represent the foetus under these circumstances, there would be no logical reason they would not seek to do so in the case of a competent pregnant woman considering an abortion or treatment detrimental to her foetus.

Ultimately, the most effective way to reduce abortion is to reduce unintended pregnancies. But that would entail the type of reality check and a complex mix of education and access to contraception that is anathema to President Bush, with his antichoice policy initiatives, such as the bid to scrap health insurance coverage for contraceptives for federal employees.

Whichever way you look at it, the womb has become deeply political. And somewhere in the middle of the battle between the warm fuzzy commercialisation and the narrow anti-abortion zealots, there will always be a woman struggling to make a choice, while she still can, with or without the machiavellian use of technology.

* Barbara Sumner Burstyn is a New Zealand writer living in Canada.