Foetus 18 Weeks: Lennart Nilsson's prenatal photography | Hacker News Reader

Foetus 18 Weeks: Lennart Nilsson's prenatal photography

theguardian.com

96 pointsRed_Tarsius29 comments

> Nilsson was only able to photograph one living foetus, though, using an endoscopic camera that travelled into a womb.

How was this approved? Inserting an endoscope into the uterus (presumably through the cervix) is likely pretty uncomfortable to the mother and has a decent risk of causing infection or loss of pregnancy and there is no offsetting medical benefit to either the mother or the fetus.

I don't know how the 1965 photo was made, but he went on to take more later, apparently in connection with amniocentesis. [0]

> LN: Oh, yes. There has been a revolution by a German optical company called Storz. They have made an endoscope with a diameter of 0.6 millimeters and one that is 0.8 millimeters. So now we can check the human embryo in a very smooth and very nice way.

> NOVA: Do you go through the cervix?

> LN: No, not the cervix. We make a kind of laparoscopy through the uterine wall. You know when the doctors are checking the genes with amniocentesis? We have done a few cases here in Sweden and in Europe during amniocentesis. And there we had the opportunity to take wonderful pictures of the fetuses.

I guess during laparoscopic surgery you typically insert a camera anyway, so maybe taking some additional photos doesn't add so much risk.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/nilsson.html

Storz remains a standard in laparoscopic surgical equipment.

I recently attended a presentation of a company that is planning an eventual experiment with a birth aboard a space-plane. I can't imagine a medical benefit of this, yet they say they have already been approached by several candidate mothers.

People make decisions based on a lot of factors; being the first baby born in space or the focus of "the best photo of the 20'th century" has other (perceived) benefits.

Sounds like a routine thing, for certain values of "routine".

Endoscopic fetoscopy is a minimally invasive surgical procedure performed during pregnancy that allows physicians to view the fetus in-utero. Physicians use endoscopic fetoscopy to evaluate, diagnose, and treat fetal abnormalities.

– https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/endoscopic-fetoscopy

It wasn’t routine in 1965, and, possibly (browsing the article, it doesn’t appear to say whether it was) wasn’t medically necessary.

From the article in the same paragraph:

> All the other images were either miscarried or terminated pregnancies.

Did his imaging cause these?

It does not appear so. The article says the hospital called him whenever there was a fetus available and that he had to complete his photography within a few hours. He had an aquarium-like tank at the hospital to suspend the deceased fetus in to take the pictures, which is why they look like they are floating.

The single image taken in utero may have been during a procedure. The article's phrasing doesn't make it sound like it was done primarily so he could have a picture.

"Nilsson had set up a studio at the hospital where his subjects would be placed in an aquarium-like environment, which is why they appear to float in space. Together, his shots create a spellbinding timeline, from an egg fertilised with sperm to foetuses at various stages up to six months."

No, he just waited for subjects (which might have taken some doing, because he photographed very neat specimens).

It’s interesting to see copyright asserted in order to prevent an image from being politicized.

It provides an interesting intersection between censorship and copyright.

So imagine instead this was a different image used for a different politics: a picture of police beating a protestor in some place and let’s say it would be an iconic image, but the photographer asserts rights in order to not create more chaos and violence.... [it could be Hong Kong, east Jerusalem, Saint Louis, Santiago,]

I'm not sure that'd even be effective. It seems like you'd have a pretty strong case for fair use defense in the US as the use could be commentary/criticism or even as "education".

There are no guarantees when it comes to fair use protections, but it'd certainly be hard to say that the photographer is losing money because people interested in his work are flocking to view protest signs or anti-abortion pamphlets.

That didn't stop the Guardian from tagging the article with 'abortion'.

Here's the discussion of "fair use of non-free image" on this image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uc_Davis_Pepper_Spray_Inc... They acknowledge that it might be copyright infringement, but feel it's 'fair' since it's a unique historical image and there aren't 'free' images which would serve as a substitute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Nilsson

He's very well-known (and celebrated) here in Sweden. His photos have been turned into multiple popular coffee-table-style photo books here. I think we had one of them in my home when I grew up.

And yes, Sweden allows abortions since 1938. And no, we don't tend to conflate these two things.

As a Swedish expat, I would like to state that history around abortion is more complicated than “allowed since 1938”. Here is the first paragraph from Wikipedia from the article on abortion in Sweden [1] and it summarises things very well:

“Abortion in Sweden was first legislated by the Abortion Act of 1938. This stated that an abortion could be legally performed in Sweden upon medical, humanitarian, or eugenical grounds. That is, if the pregnancy constituted a serious threat to the woman’s life, if she had been impregnated by rape, or if there was a considerable chance that any serious condition might be inherited by her child, she could request an abortion. The law was later augmented in 1946 to include socio-medical grounds and again in 1963 to include the risk of serious fetal damage. A committee investigated whether these conditions were met in each individual case and, as a result of this prolonged process, abortion was often not granted until the middle of the second trimester. As such, a new law was created in 1974, stating that the choice of an abortion is entirely up to the woman until the end of the eighteenth week.”

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Sweden

Thus “free” abortion was not introduced in Sweden until 1974 and at least as late as the 60s proponents of more liberal legislation organised trips to Poland where the laws were less restrictive [2] (the best reference I could find in English, here is a more opinionated one in Swedish [3]). The great irony of course is that today Polish women may seek to make the trip in reverse given the recent political changes in Poland.

[2]: https://www.thelocal.se/20180524/the-history-of-legal-aborti...

[3]: https://www.rfsu.se/vad-vi-gor/i-sverige/fragor-vi-jobbar-me...

That's a great summary, thank you.

Cognitive dissonance at its best...

I remember seeing those phottos as a child being very confused about the stars on the background. Thinking WHAT'S INSIDE A GIRL?

I've never heard a pregnant woman refer to her unborn child as "my foetus".

As we already know, the differentiation between "foetus" vs. "unborn child" has significant political implications vis-a-vis the degree of social acceptability and legal codification of a woman's individual power and control over her own body.

I've no problem with women having control over their bodies, and legalised abortion spares us the horror of backstreet alternatives. It needs to be there. But let's also be clear: if there weren't something horrific about abortion there would be no need for suppression of the truth via euphemism and beyond (showing photographs of abortion in public in the UK can get you jailed).

It would be really interesting to know who is the individual in the photos. They would be 54yo by now! (1965 is the year I saw in the article).

It would be an interesting experiment, I think, to show some research subjects these pictures and others that represent different stages of fetal development, but without the weeks listed, and have them guess how many weeks old the fetus is.

Then see whether their accuracy correlates with other things -- level of education, opinion about the legality of abortion, etc.

Why? I can’t see much of an upside there compared to the downsides of being used by both sides of the abortion debate as fuel for the fire.

The upside is to score points against your political rivals and point at how ignorant those people in the outgroup are.

In case the rivals don’t base their position on how it looks, the score may play against itself.

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