An Anthropological Examination of Mandated Ultrasounds as an Element of State Policy on Abortion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prenatal ultrasounds have become commonplace and widespread throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Ethnographic studies have illustrated that ultrasounds can have a positive impact on a woman’s pregnancy, one that establishes a relationship between the mother and the unborn fetus as a person. This relationship comes into question when examining the state’s regulation of abortion. Several states, including Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina and Ohio have considered legislation that would mandate the use of ultrasounds prior to terminating a pregnancy. The specifics of these policies vary from mandating ultrasounds as simply an option for pregnant women seeking an abortion to forcing a woman to obtain an ultrasound before the procedure would be provided. In order to understand the social and emotional outcomes of such policies at the state level it is useful to examine the role ultrasounds play in women’s lives that plan to carry their pregnancy to term. Since its widespread use beginning in the 1980s, ultrasounds have emerged as normal part of pregnancy. Ultrasounds give pregnant women the opportunity to view their pregnancy on screen allowing for the attribution of physical and possible social characteristics of the fetus prior to birth. This paper examines the effect of an ultrasound on women through an anthropological lens. By examining the cultural meaning of ultrasounds and how they affect women’s reproductive experiences cross-culturally, I will place ultrasound technology in social and cultural context that illuminates the potential impact of mandatory ultrasound policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".