Locating foetal persons through Doppler ultrasound listening at home in England

Commercially available fetal ultrasound Dopplers enable pregnant women to listen to real-time fetal heartbeat sounds at home, outside systems of biomedical antenatal surveillance. Drawing on interviews with pregnant women in England who used fetal Dopplers to listen to their fetus’s heartbeat sounds at home during pregnancy, this paper describes how the devices were used to listen to, locate, and track a fetal other which could be understood as a form of embodied person. This fetal person was then socially situated by relational listening with others, especially kin. Doppler technology is amenable to such practices through its physical design and accessibility, and its transduction of information across and between movement, sound, bodies, and discourses of biomedicine and kinship. It allows an apprehension of “other-presence” of the fetal being, which is experienced by the domestic listener as an unmediated and interactive encounter with a novel fetal person. Locating that person through Doppler listening can then become part of the pregnancy work which makes a biological human and a social being.