Baby’s First Photo: The Unstoppable Rise Of The Ultrasound Souvenir Industry

Keychains, lifelike dolls, photo studios… all before the child is even born.

Search results for #ultrasound on Iconosquare.

Via iconosquare.com

Recently, an acquaintance posted an ultrasound image to Facebook, the customary way to announce a pregnancy in the 2010s. The image was equal parts eerie and expressive: yellow-tinged and three-dimensional, like an infant in the uncanny valley. By the time I saw it, the comments were already rolling in: “Adorable!” “He looks just like his dad!” I clicked “like.”

Before the ultrasound, as the 2013 book Imaging and Imagining the Fetus puts it, “the unborn human was hidden.” Invented in the 1950s as a medical tool, by the 1980s the 20-week fetal ultrasound was becoming a standard milestone of American pregnancy. And it was doing far more than letting doctors keep tabs on a pregnancy: It was also visually introducing parents to their children long before birth, for the first time in history.

These days, the resulting image has become something more like a sentimental souvenir than a medical one. Some expectant parents visit spa-like “keepsake ultrasound studios” several times over the course of their pregnancy, to capture images at various stages. Others put ultrasound images on cakes and cupcakes, shower invitations, dog tags, and original prints, or subject them to bizarre feats of Photoshop. On the extreme end of the spectrum, you can commission a lifelike doll ($250-$550) based on your fetus’s ultrasound. How did ultrasound images become so ubiquitous?

An ultrasound keychain ($150).

Via eddystonedesigns.com

The first trend propelling the rise of the fetal “portrait” is the 3D ultrasound, which offers strikingly clear images like the one I “liked” on Facebook. This newer technology can display distinct facial features and wiggling fingers and toes in much more detail than the grainy 2D black-and-white blobs of yore. “It’s the narcissism factor,” said Blair Koenig, who has been chronicling parental over-sharing on her blog STFU, Parents since 2009 (and whose own online avatar is an “ultrasound” showing a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon). “If you can see more of your child and you’re proud already that your kid has your nose or whatever, of course it’s better to show an image that’s not totally grainy.”

Although 3D ultrasounds are widely available these days, many doctors won’t employ them unless they suspect something is amiss with the fetus — and plenty of parents still want to see those clearer images no matter what. Hence the rise of the ultrasound “studio,” which dispatches with medical checklists altogether and caters only to parents’ aesthetic desires. “We’re not doing measurements and we’re not checking for abnormalities,” said Michelle Radice, who owns a studio in New Jersey. “It’s just a bonding experience.” Instead of a cold room presided over by a dutiful technician, clients settle into a comfy recliner in a spa setting, with room for the whole family and a sonographer whose only job is to capture that perfect fetal smile. Companies with names like BabyFace and A Peek in the Pod offer “fetal portraiture” sessions; clients can also take home live-action recordings their “4D” ultrasound sessions set to lullabies. (In a few places, safety concerns over the high-powered sound waves — which have never been proven harmful — have prompted a crackdown on non-medical ultrasounds; last year, Oregon became the second state after Connecticut to ban the “keepsake” versions.)

Joli Reid is a co-owner of Baby on Board, an ultrasound studio that opened last year outside Detroit. She had worked as a sonographer at a local hospital for years, and women frequently asked her to reveal the gender early, or to help them see the baby’s face. Now she can give then what they want: If the fetus’s face isn’t visible during a session at Baby on Board, she gives the mother candy and asks her to move around a little, which encourages the baby to shift into a more “camera”-friendly position. “There are a lot of tears and a lot of screams, and it sounds like a party,” she said. Private rooms can fit up to 15 people, and many people bring their extended families. Some women come in at 15 weeks for a gender reveal, and then again shortly before birth to capture a more baby-like image. She said women who have had miscarriages sometimes come in as early as eight weeks just to hear the baby’s heartbeat. (For $60, they can take home a teddy bear implanted with the recording.)

Many parents also want to know the baby’s sex as soon as possible in the pregnancy. “This is a society where you’re supposed to start getting kids ready for college when they’re 3, so in a way it’s consistent,” said Sallie Han, an anthropologist at SUNY Oneonta who has studied how women view their ultrasounds. At many of the appointments Han observed for her research, the parents and grandparents were much more focused on the “gender reveal” than the doctors were: More than once, she heard them exclaim, “Now I can go shopping!”

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