Seeing, feeling, doing: mandatory ultrasound laws, empathy and abortion

Journal article

In recent years, a number of US states have adopted laws that require pregnant women to have an ultrasound examination, and be shown images of their foetus, prior to undergoing a pregnancy termination. In this paper, I examine one of the basic presumptions of these laws: that seeing one’s foetus changes the ways in which one might act in regard to it, particularly in terms of the decision to terminate the pregnancy or not. I argue that mandatory ultrasound laws compel women into a position of moral spectatorship and require them to recognise the foetus as a being for whom they are responsible, particularly through empathic responses to ultrasound images. The approach I propose extends the project of a bioethics of the image and highlights the need for a critical analysis of the political mobilization of empathy in discussions of abortion.

Authors: Mills, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Oxford, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
• Journal: Journal of Practical Ethics
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1-31
• Publication date: 2018-12-28
• Acceptance date: 2018-12-01
• EISSN: 2051-655X
• ISSN: 2051-655X
• Keywords: SBTMR