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See your child play in the womb

By Shan Juan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-26 07:51

Chen Shulang yawned, hiccupped and took her teensy toe up to her tiny mouth. She was showing off in front of the family when she was not supposed to be born till another about four months.

"My husband and I were almost in tears-- tears of joy-- when we first saw her, she had been inside my body for five months then," Cong Erhan, a Beijing-based real-estate saleswoman recalled yesterday. Chen was born soon after that, and is now more than one year old.

The 4-dimensional (4-D) ultrasound technology that can present an almost real image of a fetus is fast becoming a craze with would-be parents, especially well-off urban couples, across the country.

Many of them happily cough up between 200 ($30) and 2,000 yuan just to see what their babies look like. "Would-be parents can watch the DVDs of the moving fetus shot through the 4-D technology," said Liang Yu, manager of the marketing department of Beijing-based Good Mother & Baby Health Center, the first in the capital to offer such a service.

The company aims to ease expecting mothers' anxiety over their babies' health, and help build a connection between would-be fathers and their kids, Liang said.

Registered with the city health administration as mainly a health consultancy clinic, the center has been in operation since 2005, and has received about 10,000 expecting mothers.

"Thanks to the clinic, I had a better understanding of the baby's habits like when she was most active," said Cong, who first came to know about the service from a parenting online forum in 2007.

She said she would show the DVDs to her daughter when she grew up. "The DVD is highly valuable and would remind her of how much her mother cared for her."

Lockwood Young, an obstetrician in Hawaii, US, said 4-D ultrasound would one day become part of regular obstetrics-gynecology exams.

Since the first time ultrasound was used to scan a fetus, a debate has been raging on whether it is safe for mother and child. But research shows diagnostic ultrasound is not harmful, Young said.

Still some experts think otherwise. Many in China allege ultrasound centers are using medical technology to make money.

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Most of China's public hospitals don't offer the service because it requires too much time and extra doctors. Besides, many people fear it could be misused to identify the sex of a fetus. Fetus sex determination tests are banned in China.

The traditional preference for boys and the country's family planning policy have prompted many people in rural areas, and even in cities, to commit female feticide. That has left China with 32 million more boys than girls, an imbalance that can create social problems.

"Some baby scan centers indicate the fetus's sex in the DVDs, violating the law," said Wang Lei, a researcher with Xinjiang Social Science Academy.

"Many centers that have opened across the country since 2006 do that," said Liang. "We, too, have been asked about the sex of fetuses by would-be parents. But our answer has always been 'no'."

"We select certain angles to scan the fetus to avoid determination of the gender. We have installed cameras in every scanning room, too, to monitor the activities of doctors," she said.