WHY COULDN"T THEY MAKE IT LOOK LIKE THE CREATURE IN "ALIEN" :

They Bring Good Spin to Life : GE's televised promotion of the pro-life agenda. (Matthew Nisbet, 6.14.02, American Prospect)

The new and evocative commercial for General Electric's 4D Ultrasound imaging system, which has been appearing across broadcast and cable networks, opens with a saccharine rendition of Ewan McColl's 1965 love ballad "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." The song serves as background music for a slow motion close-up of a blonde-haired, green-eyed pregnant mother's loving gaze. Still in slow motion, the ad then cuts to the object of her adoration, a GE computer monitor displaying the three-dimensional real-time movements of a golden-hued fetus. Shifting back to the awe-filled mother, the camera pans out and her thirty-something, waspish husband's anxious face appears. The next cut reveals a medical technician running the ultrasound transducer over the pregnant woman's stomach, as the GE monitor in the foreground highlights the movements of the fetus.

The clincher comes when a soft male voice enters over the music: "When you see your baby for the first time on the new GE 4D ultrasound system, [pause] ... it really is a miracle." The ad then closes by juxtaposing the fetal profile with the profile of the newborn infant as the parents hold the baby joyously in their arms.

It's not difficult to understand why pro-life conservatives are using the word "miracle" to describe the free political advertising that GE has so generously provided.

I don't know if Mr. Nisbet has kids, but when you see an ultrasound "it" quickly becomes "he" or "she". It just isn't possible to objectify your child once you've seen him or her in that detail and as technology gets better the difficulty of maintaining that babies aren't human until you can hear them scream is going to get worse and worse for the pro-abortion forces. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2002 8:33 PM