One morning some years ago I was at a clinic in Brighton, having an appointment about an upcoming abortion. An odd winter, my second away from home, I was brittle and irritated with adult life. And I was confused when, suddenly, the woman turned the ultrasound screen round and told me to look at the heartbeat. The clinic’s window looked towards the sea, near a nightclub where I worked on the door, and I remember looking at her, then out of the window, then at the screen, where her finger hung by the black image for what felt like many minutes. I felt puzzled at the time, later shocked, today horrified.
I was reminded of that day twice recently: first when I heard about an anti-abortion charity in Scotland that gives ultrasound scans to women considering terminations, and then again when I read about a recent case in America. A teenager asking a judge for an abortion was told to have an ultrasound because (said the judge), “If the proposed mother is shown the ultrasound, they will change their mind.” By humanising the embryo they try to psychologically coerce the woman into going through with a pregnancy she knows she shouldn’t have.
