The following essay was first published in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body, at the Museum of the Moving Image, which runs until January 3, 2027. The book is available for purchase at MoMI's shop, both online and in person.

You are lying half naked on an exam table in a darkened room, covered in crinkly, thin paper that provides a scrim of sterility and a nod toward modesty. Your bladder is uncomfortably full. The sonographer, fully clothed, sits at a computer monitor right next to you. She doesn’t make eye contact while she snaps on her latex gloves and explains what’s required: Please relax, it will make it easier to insert the wand. You try to be friendly, make a joke about her having “the most interesting job.” You can’t tell if she smiles behind her surgical mask. She tears open a red foil packet and extracts a Trojan condom, which she expertly rolls down the shaft of the probe. She squeezes a clear gel onto the tip with one hand, then gently pushes it past your labia and into your vagina. The goopy gel is cold, slimy, ectoplasmic, and then you feel the probe hit your cervix. You become aware of the cavity inside you and are suddenly attuned to its flexibility. You can feel your swollen uterus gently pop against your lower pelvic wall. The technician, never taking her eyes off the screen, uses her hand to push on your abdomen to get your organs closer to the transducer; it feels like you are being rearranged.

Sound waves map your interior: frequencies higher than what a human can hear echo and bounce off your insides, then back to the probe. Their pathways are translated into electrical signals. You think about a paper you wrote in college about echolocation in dolphins and bats. As the transducer explores, an abstract 2-D image appears on the computer screen. It looks like a solar system, a universe of anechoic areas, circular structures with an echogenic brim, a coronal cross section of a phantom. You study the sonographer, try to read her body language for an indication of positive or negative results. What does she see in the image?

She says once upon a time there will be a torso, once upon a time there will be lungs. This smudgy area, right here. Here is the beautiful heart. The two white lines are the spine. The white line of the femur. He’s saying hello! He’s yawning. Gray, white, and black patches float in a wedge-shaped beam of light. Measurements click with plus signs, landmarks of dotted lines. Following legislative orders, she speaks the language of viability as she scans for the unviable, narrating personhood on a bet. You look harder; you can’t distinguish the echoes of the machine from the echoes of the fetus. “What one sees depends on how one looks.” Your mind’s eye fails to fill the flat image with the fullness of human flesh.

Once the procedure is complete, the sonographer leaves the room to show the results to the doctor. You reach for your phone and take a picture of the screen just as she returns. She looks at you directly for the first time and tells you pictures are not allowed. Why is the image of your inside not yours for the taking?

You decide to take your business elsewhere. Just off the highway, there’s a fetal imaging center called Avatar, Inc., that promises exceptional 3-D and 4-D fetal keepsake images for a reasonable price. You lie on a white orthopedic bed, and you invite your friends to sit on the sectional sofa provided. Everyone has a good view of the fetal payload as it is projected onto a big screen. For the classic package, you get two black-and-white photos of the fetus with “lifelike,” baby-face, AI-enhanced imaging downloaded directly to your phone. For a slightly higher price you can get four photos, a gender determination, and a 10-minute video of your ultrasound set to music. There are also gold and platinum packages, as well as add-on options like a heartbeat buddy and a gender-reveal confetti cannon. No cold abstractions that require interpretive narration here. You can see a full-on baby with your own eyes, ready to get going once he leaves the fetal hotel room that is your body. He’s calling for room service right now. He’s ordering a turkey dinner. He’s drinking a bit too much and starting to bust stuff up. It’s a man’s world, baby!

*

In 1884, a pregnant woman in Northampton, Massachusetts, slipped and fell on a public road, which led to her having a miscarriage. In Dietrich v. Inhabitants of Northampton, lawyers argued that the town’s negligence had killed the fetus and that damages should be paid to the fetus’s next of kin, its mother. In his majority opinion, then state court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. determined that no such claim could be made because the child was part of the mother while in her womb and thus could not be treated as a separate entity. The mother and child were intimately entwined such that the fetus could not have a juridical existence. This understanding held for over 60 years.

After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, scientists worked to find a way to see into the dark oceanic depths to aid in safer navigation around icebergs. During World War I, French physicist Paul Langevin invented the hydrophone, which used ultrasonic waves to locate German submarines; this technique of listening to sound echoes to “see” what was inaccessible to the human eye eventually led to the invention of sonar, but also to the invention of the medical ultrasound. Early experiments in the field used equipment borrowed from military installations.

In 1946, a Washington, D.C., District Court case (Bonbrest v. Kotz) set a new precedent for the juridical life of the fetus. It was determined that an unborn child could now sue for injuries in the womb owing to medical malpractice. Justice Matthew Francis McGuire determined that Justice Holmes’s 1884 decision was based on a legal fiction and that “the law is presumed to keep pace with the sciences and medical science certainly has made progress since 1884.”

Technological developments in ultrasound imaging picked up steam in the late 1950s. Douglass Howry’s sonogram laboratory experiments—which required patients to sit uncomfortably in a tub of water—produced pictures, but they were grainy and difficult to interpret. A few years later, after using ultrasound to measure the diameter of a fetal head, Ian Donald helped invent the first 2-D ultrasound scanner, the Diasonograph. It was bulky and difficult to maneuver, but it produced the best images yet and in real time. Donald was a passionate antiabortionist, however, and was the first to pair ultrasound visuals with personifying narration to dissuade women from getting abortions. This subjective captioning of an abstracted image in the name of objective science—this determination that the image represents life itself—is at the foundation of antiabortion legislation today.

In 1974, Roe v. Wade declared that the word “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, did not apply to the unborn. One week after the Supreme Court’s decision, the Human Life Amendment—which aimed to give the fetus equal rights from the moment of conception—was proposed in Congress; when it finally reached the floor for a vote in 1983, it failed.

Starting in the 1980s, as ultrasound technology became more portable and affordable, showing images of fetuses became a standard and ritualized practice of prenatal care. Invasive transducers that could be inserted into body cavities were also newly on the scene. As the technology advanced, legal arguments for the rights of the fetus grew louder and states began to pass their own restrictive fetal laws. While the body of the fetus came into focus, the body of the mother became less protected; her body became an incubator, another piece of equipment. Fetal homicide laws, originally written to protect pregnant women from violence, were reinterpreted to criminalize women for the loss of their own pregnancies and to indirectly establish fetal personhood. As of 2024, 38 states have passed fetal homicide laws.

Since the 1990s, required ultrasounds have become a key tool in antiabortion legislation—even though there is no medical benefit to having one before the second trimester. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of 2025, in 27 states abortion providers must suggest to the patient that she look at the image while a compulsory ultrasound is being performed, six states mandate that providers must show and describe the image during the procedure, and 13 states require information on ultrasound services be provided to women seeking to end their pregnancies. The technology allows for the valuing of the image of the fetus above the body of the mother.

The first real-time ultrasound scanner with a 3-D/4-D option was brought online in 2000; though it produces the same information that a 2-D scanner provides, it is easier to use, and the enhanced images don’t require a trained sonographer to interpret them. It is understood that the primary utility of this technology is to make the fetus look more human. With the idea that this may foster a stronger maternal connection to the growing fetus, antiabortionists also see it as a tool that can lead women seeking to end their pregnancies to change their mind, even though studies have proved that viewing their ultrasound images has no effect on women who already are certain about their decision. In a 2014 study led by obstetrician-gynecologist Mary Gatter of over 15,000 women given ultrasounds as part of compulsory so-called abortion care, 99 percent of the pregnancies still ended in abortion, whether the women opted to look at the ultrasound images or not.

In 2020, an Oklahoma criminal court held that a viable fetus that is injured can be considered a “victim” of child neglect or abuse, seemingly overturning the 1884 Dietrich v. Northampton case. Meanwhile, legislators at both the federal and the state levels continue to fight to extend constitutional rights to fetuses and embryos from the moment of conception. Heartbeat laws restrict abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy, speciously claiming that after six weeks a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In fact, at six weeks the fetal heart has not yet formed; the fluttering beats are the pulsing of cells vibrating toward cardiac development, which is completed by the tenth week. To access evidence of the beginnings of cardiac activity before six weeks requires a vaginal ultrasound (rather than an abdominal one), a requirement some states, like Wyoming, have mandated prior to an abortion in order to misleadingly prove fetal personhood. Critics have likened the requirement of this invasive procedure to state rape. Of note is that in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Supreme Court justices were silent on the issue of fetal personhood.

The 1979 TV documentary The Inside View, a short film about medical imaging, ends with narrator Paul Vaughan speculating a future where:

As we see more, we will come to consider our bodies in a different way. Perhaps as a dynamic system, rather than a static one. And as our understanding changes, our concepts of what we are will be changed, just as they were changed by the first men who looked, the first explorers of the human body.

Vaughan muses on how these groundbreaking technologies enable the medical gaze to look into the obscure interiorities of patients without cutting them open, affording a revolutionary way of seeing that will transform how we understand ourselves as humans.

Several centuries before the first ultrasound image flickered onto darkened glass, St. Thomas Aquinas observed in Summa Theologiae that the human body, far from a static object, is a dynamic composite of matter and form, and as such it is a process, a substance in transformation. Bodies are perpetually in the process of becoming. As new cells regenerate to replace old ones as they die, the body is constantly unmade and remade. What happens, then, when it is possible to “see” inside of oneself, to bear witness to the self’s interiority, a self that is in a continual process of becoming? Lying next to the dark crystal, you can watch as the sonic eye sends out its waves blindly, penetrating your barricaded cage of flesh and bone.

The sonic eye emits high-frequency sound waves that ripple out to envelop and bounce off the folds and crevices of organs, of the self’s interior, collecting data that are relayed back to the software for translation, first as a binary code of zeros and ones, then as an image that can be perceived by the human eye. The waves erode our imaginings. All those stories that we humans tell ourselves about who we are—that we are solid, that we are static, that we are our selves, whole, impervious, and singular—come into question. To imagine that we are a multitude is an existential impossibility. The realization flickers into focus on the computer screen: We are meat. We are not, in the words of Aquinas, “a soul as a body.” We are only a body. The shock of obliteration is a feeling not unlike ice crystallizing in your veins—as when you helplessly witness the meat and bloody viscera explode from Nostromo officer Kane’s abdomen, his insides burst open by a phallus dentata fetus in the iconic scene in Alien. The self’s humanity, the self’s certainty of the body being more than mere meat, of the self being a person with a soul, shattered into smithereens by the sonic eye. Something inside of you assumes an agency that overtakes your own humanity, your own personhood, and erupts from your interior to snuff you out: the ultrasonic portrait of your fetus.

It seems that now, from the vantage point of a post-Dobbs, ultrasound-mandates-that-legislate-the-forced-looking-at-fetal-images timeline, Western medical and political knowledge of the interiority of our bodies is dominated by the visual sense. Since (at least) the European Renaissance, sight has been valorized as the only human sense that confirms reality, that makes abstractions concrete and objective; sight is considered to have a unique access to the truth, above all the other sensory modalities that humans use to come into contact with the world. To see is to have and to hold power.

The technical ability to envision the process of becoming a human with the aid of the transvaginal ultrasound wand brings the sonic eye into the eye of the political storm. Although it enrolls the unseeing senses of touch and hearing while it probes and measures, it ultimately produces a distilled image, a 2-D (or 3-D or 4-D) visualization that flattens and erases the fullness of the living body. The already living life becomes just a means to visualize the life that could be—an organization of tissues in the process of becoming human, which are ideologically and potently crafted by the ultrasound into a fetal superperson.

*

When does one become a person? Does someone become a person because of a law or a technology? In our ultrasound era, personhood, you could say, is determined strictly through the visual sense: the sonic eye narrows the scope of humanity to a pinpoint of pixelated light and data visualization. The mother, a splayed-out specimen prodded by a biocompatible plastic probe, is a data-producing vessel for fetal life.

Yet, one might say that personhood is a social construct of place and time, defined by the net of social relations that catches a child. For the ancient Romans, for instance, personhood started at nine days after birth, when the newborn was presented to the baby’s familial relations beyond their parents. For the Wari, a culture indigenous to the Amazon Basin, personhood is slowly acquired over years, and it is embedded in social flows that can make or undo one’s status as a person over a lifetime. Personhood is only possible in a knot of social bonds that bind the person into kinship networks with other humans.

Or one could point to the haptic, the sense of touch and feeling, to locate the beginnings of personhood. For many who experience pregnancy, the developing fetus begins moving its limbs and torso sometime in the second trimester; this movement is called the “quickening.” In medieval Europe, Church authorities recognized the quickening as the crucial moment during pregnancy when the soul enters the body, which inaugurates personhood. The private sensation of the fetus fluttering against the sides of the uterine walls at around 16 weeks is what alerts the mother that she is in the company of another being. It is a sensation—a feeling of another's presence in your own body—that creates the bonding. Only she can access that deep-inside feeling of the quickening; no one and nothing else can. The vision of the sonic eye in the first trimester is just a projection of life, a conjecture, an avatar.

How to overthrow the tyranny of the sonic eye, the dehumanization of the medical subject through the fetal image? How to break the screen, tear off the gloves, and welcome her back into the mess of the tactile human netting? Maybe the first step is to recenter women’s experiences of their bodies; how their insides feel. Perhaps we must use our bare hands to smash the lenses, to destroy the regime of the sonic eye and replace it with touch. ♦

Adapted from the catalog of Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body. Copyright (c) 2026 by Elisabeth Sherman and Sonia Shechet Epstein. Used with permission of the publisher, Museum of the Moving Image. All rights reserved.