Get Me Out by Randi Hutter Epstein

Author:Randi Hutter Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

12

Womb with a View

The waiting room at View a Miracle, a photo studio for fetuses, was packed with pregnant women, husbands, toddlers, and expectant grandparents. View a Miracle is located in the Lion’s Plaza, a strip mall in New Jersey, about an hour’s drive south of New York City. For $95 to $200, depending on the package you choose, you can get a DVD and a CD with a selection of three-dimensional images of your minus-2-month-old. This is not a medical exam. The sonographers are not doctors. They do not diagnose. They are not allowed. “You spend so much on the pregnancy and baby, what’s a few hundred dollars more,” said a pregnant customer in the waiting room. Why not?

It’s really not a waiting room in the sense of a doctor’s waiting room. It’s more a boutique. Until it’s your turn, you can buy baby clothes and frames for the fetal photos. There were so many choices. So many puns. One frame had teddy bears with the caption “I can bearly Wait to See.” A frame with a toy truck border said “Under Construction.”

The photo studio was tucked in the back. It had two television sets, one for the mother and a second for her guests. There is seating along the wall for 25. Video streaming is available for an extra fee. (Shortly after the visit, a teacher said she “freaked out” when a 3-D photo of her friend’s fetus popped up on her cell phone.) The room was not quite living room cozy, but it wasn’t doctor office staid either.

“Some people don’t really want to see their babies before they are born,” said Kayla Gipson, one of the sonographers. The first clients that afternoon were a 30-something husband and wife. They did not bring guests. The woman got into ready position on the examining table—reclining with her head propped up so she could see the TV, her shirt lifted above her belly so the sonographer could rub her abdomen with the gel-coated ultrasound wand. Soft muzak played. It was a medley of Brahms’s “Lullaby,” “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” followed by—can you guess?—Roberta Flack’s “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

In the advertisements, the images seem like a shadowy image of a baby in a water-filled ziplock bag. Shadowy but cute. In real life, it is eerie. The unborn babies look like orange glow-in-the-dark ghosts. Picture a sunburned Casper the Friendly Ghost pressing his face against a window. Cute to some. Creepy to most—especially if it’s your kid. Sometimes chunks of the head are missing. That’s because, depending on where you put the probe, the placenta covers the body and appears as a black blob. It makes the face look like a mouse has nibbled a chunk out of it. It has nothing to do with the machine or the sonographer, but how the baby happens to be posing in relation to the placenta.

The sonographers said ultrasound images are reassuring. The first dad looked frightened and nauseated staring at his fetus that had a mouse-eaten head and smushed nose.

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