Clinic worker: ultrasounds allow people to ‘personify’ the fetus

A clinic worker talks about changing attitudes about abortion due to ultrasound:

A lot of it is the politics around ultrasound, I think. That, I mean, maybe that’s why some of the abortion stuff is changed, that now you can see that it’s a fetus and it looks like a baby, and it sucks his thumb, and it, you know kicks around, just like newborns do… And so it’s like we can personify the fetus as opposed to, like, relating to this woman.

—Wendy Simonds, Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 79.