The First Nine Months
Before modern instruments existed, how did anyone form a picture of those early months in the womb? What follows is guesswork, though it holds together reasonably well. The evidence available back then probably came down to stillbirths and miscarriages. Midwives would have held most of the practical knowledge, along with early medical students, some of whom robbed graves themselves or paid others to do it. Someone could dig into that history further.
Watching conception and growth as they happen is a very new ability. The 3-D ultrasound is recent, and so is surgery performed on a fetus while it remains inside the womb. For a long time, whatever we learned about those months tended to come from a pregnancy that ended, whether by choice or not. Not long ago there were hardly any images of the stages a baby passes through before birth. Artists sketched their guesses more often than anyone managed an actual photograph or scientific record of growth. X-rays did exist, but people worried they damaged the developing child.
So the womb stayed mostly closed to understanding until the moment of delivery, living or dead, finally revealed what had happened. Plenty of parents endured a long stretch of not knowing, right up to that point. Women who had no account of their own often picked up the hushed accounts of what had befallen others. The grief ran deep, yet it usually went unspoken, and the doctors and staff around these families rarely offered much emotional comfort. Go back far enough, which is not actually all that far, and you can still find the stone markers set up for mothers and infants who never survived those months.
That raises a further question. At what point in those months does ending a pregnancy become acceptable? We tend to behave like the proverbial ostrich, head in the sand, rather than reckon with what is occurring at each stage or with how the procedure itself is carried out. Only lately have we begun offering any formal way to mourn for families who lose a baby to miscarriage or an early stillbirth.
The procedures around ending a pregnancy remain murky: when it is permitted, and whose consent is required. The woman has long been nudged into surrendering her ability to say no once she has already agreed. I can speak to this from experience. I have never seen it written anywhere that a woman had to sign papers granting the doctor the right to terminate (at the latest point an abortion was then allowed) should an amniocentesis show the baby had Down syndrome. Yet two separate obstetricians told me exactly that.