The recent stories about the thousands, or maybe even millions, of baby girls aborted in India over the last decade is heartbreaking (look here for story). And while stories like this can bring you to question the value of technological advancements like ultrasound, there is hope in remembering the potential good of such advancements.
While this story was heartbreaking, it reminded me of a Cal Thomas column I read a few years back. In the column, entitled “Bringing a Very Good Thing to Light” Thomas discusses an Ultrasound device “that allows doctors and parents to look inside the womb of a pregnant woman and see the image of a baby in “real-time 4D” rather than the more difficult to read traditional “2D” image.” Thomas hopes that the device, which produces a high quality image similar to a photograph, will help expectant mothers see their unborn babies as a baby rather than a product of conception, lump of tissue, or fetus.
Thomas writes,
In more than 30 years of speaking to pregnancy help centers, I’ve met hundreds of women who’ve had abortions. Virtually all have told me that if they’d seen a picture of their baby, they would have made a different choice. They’ve also told me that many abortion clinics turn sonogram machines in such a way that the mother is prevented from seeing her baby’s image on the screen.
Thomas concludes the article with a hope that the new machine (well, new when the article was written in 2002) might “even make her [the mother] smile and decide to bring another “good thing” to life.”
I hope that over the next few years, as this technology becomes more widely available in India, and in the US, the images produced by ultrasound will be less likely to cause a woman to get an abortion, and more likely to choose to protect her baby.