It is an almost unremarked and yet extraordinarily common practice now for expectant parents to send ultrasound photographs of their unborn babies to family and friends – almost as soon as they know of the pregnancy.
From 10 or 12 weeks’ gestation, it is the fashion to put up on Facebook, or otherwise send electronically, images of the baby in the womb. And predictably a business has sprung up to support the demand. Hello Baby in St Helen’s, Merseyside, scans up to 50 pregnant women a week, offering a range of merchandise featuring the picture of the baby – a coffee mug, a keyring, or a DVD of the 30-minute scan.
But now the Royal College of Obstetricians, as well as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), is warning against the practice on the grounds that those operating the business may not understand “the standards and guidelines associated with ultrasound scanning”.
The medics say they are concerned that parents may be given the wrong information about gender or other anatomical details, such as the presence of a heartbeat. They are also concerned lest the operator be “unqualified”, or the ultrasound be too early in pregnancy.
Lydia Ellison, who runs Hello Baby, insists that all procedures are safe and she has many happy customers. She also suggests that criticism of her enterprise might be because “people are jealous”.
It is true that professionals are often “jealous” when outsiders seem to intrude on their territory. Established institutions such as Nice and the Royal College will not want freelance competitors in the field.
And with their medical allusions to “the foetus”, perhaps they don’t entirely like the way that Hello Baby treats even an early pregnancy with the human touch.
Certainly, all these procedures should be safely done, and any organisation carrying out ultrasound scans should be inspected for health and safety.
That guaranteed, baby pictures in utero are now a thriving practice, and surely a positive development signalling the beginning of life.
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Opinions differ about The Death of Stalin, currently standing fifth in the top 10 most popular movies in Britain. Some find it brilliantly funny, in a ghoulish way; some consider that the terror of Stalin’s regime is not a fit subject for comedy. I think it covers both bases: it is darkly comedic but it also makes serious points about the Stalinist terror. We see the much-feared dawn knock on the door from the NKVD secret police, and the ghastly summary executions and contempt for human life that the regime represented.
Michael Palin is a terrific Molotov (who agreed meekly to have his own wife, Polina, sent to a gulag) and Jason Isaacs is hilariously brutal as Marshal Zhukov (with a Yorkshire accent). The black comedy at the heart of the story is true: there was total panic about summoning a doctor when Stalin had a fatal stroke because he had sent so many of the leading medics to gulags or had them executed.
Many of these doctors (and dentists, too, by the way) were Jewish, and Stalin had developed a persecution mania that they were trying to poison him – although that is not mentioned in the movie. Molotov’s wife was also Jewish, which was the reason for her banishment; she had met up with her old school friend, Israel’s Golda Meir. (Despite Molotov’s betrayal, he loved his wife, and their marriage was afterwards quite serenely resumed.)
The awful crimes of Beria (played by Simon Russell Beale) are indeed underlined: as well as murder and torture, he was a rapist with a taste for very young girls. Back in the 1990s, Robert Harris wrote a vivid thriller, Archangel, which centres on the whole grim story of Stalin’s terrible death.
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The Church of England has just made an excellent case for the wearing of school uniforms, in saying that every schoolchild should be entitled to wear a tutu or a tiara if they were, perchance, transitioning their gender. The school uniform is a useful discipline in complying with an institutional rule that all are equal, but that school is no place for showing off wealth or flashy clothes, or for advertising your sexuality. You are there to learn, not to experiment with your personal identity.
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