BABY PICTURES Sonogram snapshots catch on

One online baby-photo contest even has a category for the unborn.
By RITA KEMPLEY
WASHINGTON POST
Welcome to the premiere of "A Star Is Unborn": See the placenta, the dark amniotic fluid, the precious cargo floating inside. See Junior blink, yawn, wave, suck his tiny toes.
Awwwwwwww.
Umbilicam is here.
Pregnant women impatient for that first Kodak moment need wait no more. Instant -- make that premature -- gratification has arrived as what was a medical diagnostic device has become a prenatal portrait tool. The uterus now is a womb with a view.
For a few hundred bucks, besotted parents can buy a sneak peek at their progeny. And if that isn't enough, they can give her a shot at the title of Miss In-Utero America.
Better technology
The prenatal sonogram has come a long way since its inception in the 1970s. With the advent of 3-D ultrasound in 1986, the images, which used to be flat and grainy, are much more like regular photographs: unclouded, sepia-toned if desired, and so detailed that new moms, such as Lori Kinnard of Marietta, Ga., swear their newborns look like they did in the womb.
"You just feel like you already know him," the doting mother of 5-week-old Brendan said. "The sonograms showed a lot of hair; he has a lot of hair. He had fat cheeks and his cheeks are fat. His nose looks like it did in the picture. You could tell that he would look just like my husband James's family from the profile. So sweet."
Matt Evans, co-owner of Baby Insight, a prenatal portrait studio in Bethesda, Md., compares the difference between the two-dimensional and 3-D processes to that between "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Finding Nemo." Sonographers can play with the image to come up with the best angle and clear the picture of any debris.
Growing industry
Evans and his wife, Laurie, are among a growing number of entrepreneurs -- most of them moms themselves -- who have opened ultrasound portrait studios. They are, however, a rarity on the East Coast. California is the ultrasonic breeding ground.
Linda Ferraro, owner of Peek-a-Boo, a solo operation in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., just loves her "super-cute little business." In addition to "mummy's tummy tour," Ferraro provides keepsakes from in-vitro videos to T-shirts (bearing such slogans as "I'm the big sister") to glossy fetal portraits worthy of framing. Parents who want to share them with the wider world can build their own cooing Web baby books, including the sonogram and mom's and pop's notes about the pregnancy.
Stage parents had a chance to get an early start on their wee one's Hollywood career: An online kiddie photo contest had a category for the unborn, run by Jenny Tate, a stay-at-home mom.
The contest by prettybaby.net, offered a whopping $50 cash prize, and all entries will be on the site for three months.
"It's just the cutest way to show your friends and relatives your sonogram," Tate said.
Shower attraction
Janine Shuck, an expectant mom from Centreville, Va., posed for a fetal portrait the day before her baby shower. She passed around pictures and played the videotape of the prenatal Paige for guests.
"She was opening and closing her mouth and sticking out her tongue. It was so sweet," Shuck said.
"It is such a gift for the baby," she added. "When she is 5 or 6 and understands what is going on, I can show her what she looked like in my stomach. ... It's something she can have forever."
Robert Gergely, head of obstetrics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years, gave up his practice in 1999 to open the 3D Sonography Center of Beverly Hills. "I was mesmerized by the baby's face in the womb," said Gergely, who performs the sonogram at the beginning of the third trimester. "Right away, baby becomes real. Right away, the parents start falling in love. Having babies is all about love."
The price
And maybe a little wad of money.
For $250, the parents-to-be get an 81/2-by-11 glossy and four wallet-size prints of "baby's first portrait." (At Peek-a-Boo, $100 buys you a 25-minute video, 15 to 18 still photographs and a load of pamphlets.)
Not everyone is entranced by this marriage of commerce and medicine.
"After first blanching at how incredibly sick it sounds, I realized that it was inevitable," said Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, author, lecturer and former president of the National Popular Culture Association. "For several generations, life's major milestones have been photographed. Junior blows out the first candle on his birthday cake, gets on the school bus for the first time, takes off the training wheels. If it's important, there's a camera on the scene. If it's important, it's not engraved on stone nor written in a book; it's on film."
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the urge is perfectly normal. "The human baby is the most vulnerable creature in the world, far more so than the other primates," she said. "Actually, humans are supposed to spend 18 months in the womb. At some point in our history, women had to give birth earlier because the baby's head got bigger. So when you are looking at a 1-month-old, you are looking at a fetus."
Getting others involved
She added that a mother's drive to involve as many people in the pregnancy as possible is thousands, maybe millions of years old. "Giving birth is woman's most important and most dangerous job," Fisher said. "Many women once died in the process, leaving orphans, so the more people who have bonded with the woman and her child, the more secure the future of her DNA."
The cradle of civilization rocks on.
Jennifer Sewing, who recently opened a Fetal Fotos franchise in Atlanta, urges clients to bring friends and relatives to watch the sneak preview on the center's 20-inch monitor. A technician rubs the mother's belly with what poet Karl Kirchwey described as "succulences of conducting gel," then slides the transducer over her stomach. Junior is ready for his close-up.
"You see the heart, the tummy, the little dinky. So adorable," Sewing cooed.
For the most part, 3-D dinky sightings have been rare on the East Coast. Valerie Christensen, spokeswoman for the Utah-based corporation, observed that most Fetal Fotos franchises are located in the West.
"The response is very different in LA. The floodgates opened. Westerners are more accepting," she explained. "In the East, you have to be able to answer a lot more questions than here."
Safety factor
Like, is it safe or what?
The Food and Drug Administration, which frowns on the keepsake business but leaves its regulation to state and local authorities, issued a bulletin last September cautioning against unnecessary exposure to ultrasound, especially during pregnancy. The American Institute of Ultrasound Medicine echoed the sentiment in November, warning "physicians and would-be imaging entrepreneurs that 2-D and 3-D obstetrical ultrasound should not be used to view, obtain pictures, or determine gender of a fetus without a medical prescription."
The organizations are also concerned that women will be falsely reassured by these commercial sonograms. Baby Insight, Fetal Fotos and Peek-a-Boo do make it clear to clients that they are not providing diagnostic ultrasounds. Fetal Fotos requires that a customer's doctor be notified and given an opportunity to object. Many pregnant women have already had diagnostic imaging, but the ultrasound shops have procedures in place if a sonogram shows any abnormalities: Stop the ultrasound and send the woman to her care providers.
Aside from the FDA's recommendations, no federal regulations govern this embryonic industry. Qualifications for technicians vary. Fetal Fotos employs ultrasound technicians from a variety of backgrounds. Some are licensed technicians affiliated with the American Registry of Diagnostic Medical Sonographers, others are certified by clinical ultrasound schools, and still others have trained under an obstetrician's supervision.
Rebuttal
Gergely insists the ultrasounds are safe. He is not without support in the medical mainstream.
"There are no conclusive studies proving there is any damage at all caused by ultrasound," said Charlotte Larson, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics at the George Washington University Hospital.
Although she had not heard of the prenatal portrait business before, she could hardly contain her enthusiasm for the trend.
"That is so cute, so adorable," she said. "What a great way to make money. More power to them. Maybe I should look into it."