Photographic evidence

Perhaps no other technology has had more of a direct impact on the abortion debate than ultrasound. In a recently published book titled Imaging and Imagining the Fetus: The Development of Obstetric Ultrasound (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), authors Malcolm Nicolson, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and engineer John Fleming explore the history of clinical ultrasound and its monumental effects on how society views the unborn.

Nicolson and Fleming write that ultrasound imaging was initially developed to detect industrial flaws in ships, but was adapted and used for clinical purposes in Scotland in 1956. By the 1970s, British hospitals routinely used ultrasound, but doctors didn’t bring it into widespread use in the United States until the mid-1970s. Over the years since then, ultrasound technology has advanced dramatically: Machines were once the size of refrigerators and produced a flat, black-and-white image. Now they are so portable that many units can fit into a doctor’s coat pocket and can render detailed, 4D ultrasound video.

This portability has revolutionized the way pro-life activists can reach women considering abortion. Save the Storks is an organization that equips specially designed Mercedes vans with the latest in sonogram technology, allowing the organization to do outreach directly from abortion center sidewalks.

But the images themselves are what make ultrasound such a significant pro-life technology.

“Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the fetus,” Nicolson said in an interview with Live Science. In fact, Nicolson said, some women report not feeling pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.

Search and rescue

Although you get literally millions of hits from a Google search, you’ll probably find what you want from the top 10 to 20 results. Those top “hits” are often there as the result of something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where specialized technology companies will—for a fee—structure a website to help it reach the top of the stack of search results.

Now, this SEO technology is helping to connect abortion-minded parents with pregnancy resources they might not have been aware of. Online for Life (OFL) is one such organization.

“OFL consists of business people who left the for-profit world to rescue babies and families from abortion full time,” said OFL’s Brian Fisher in an interview with Live Action News. “Several of us have some background in Internet marketing and technology, so we apply the same sort of tools we used in our for-profit days to rescue babies.”

When someone searches for abortion information in her area, OFL will pop up as an option. OFL then connects these individuals with crisis pregnancy centers or mobile sonogram buses. —M.C.

Incubators on the go

Life-saving technology isn’t always complicated or expensive. James Roberts, a British industrial design graduate student, has won the $45,000 James Dyson prize by developing a simple, low-cost way for developing countries to care for prematurely born infants: a portable, inflatable incubator.

Roberts’ manually inflatable prototype expands to about one meter in length but can be deflated and shipped as a flat pack. A ceramic heating element controlled by a small computer keeps both temperature and humidity stable. The entire unit can run for more than a day on just a car battery if electricity is unavailable.

Roberts estimates his prototype could be manufactured for $400 and offer performance similar to units costing almost 100 times as much. —M.C.