Nadi: A Critical Examination Of Visual Rhetoric

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Not just the ‘alive’ foetus but also bits and pieces of what the author calls its ‘necrophiliac remains’
evoke pity.
The Silent Scream- Images of foetus turned into a moving video.
Bringing foetus ‘to life’.
Extending the anti-abortion discussion from mystical/ religious to (pseudo) scientific/technological.
Typical of ‘politics of style’ of late capitalism where Superficial impression is made to pass off as
entire image.
The makers of the Silent Scream got the idea from a New England Journal of Medicine by an ethicist
who said that seeing USG images brought about ‘bonding’ between mother and child and therefore
fewer abortions.
The film in short 
Two simultaneous texts 
The medical event  a real-time USG imaging of an abortion.  Medical text  Visual  “From the
victim’s vantage point”.
The narrator  the ‘good’ doctor. – Moral text  Verbal.
Music  Ominous, ‘impending doom’.
Pointer drags along the screen ‘Explaining’ the otherwise inscrutable movement on screen.
Commentary- ‘living unborn child’, ‘another human being indistinguishable from us’, ‘afraid’, the
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cannula ‘moving towards child’ to ‘shatter dismember, crush, destroy’ ’to tear the child apart’. ‘The
foetus senses aggression in its sanctuary’ ‘senses pain’ ‘attempts to escape’ and finally
‘Rears back its head’ ‘in a silent scream’. Not so silent for us though as we are listening to some
music which is horrifying. Pollack rightly calls this verbal rhetoric not of science but of Miami Vice!
There is no woman on the screen but we are told that she is a feminist!
Also that she “will never do it again” after seeing the video
(Do you think, Dr. Nathanson that usually, after abortion, we women say – “Ah that was naaice. Should do it again.
Maybe fix up the next appointment right now?”)
The film is presented as document/medical evidence.
Enlisting medical imagery to present mythic-patriarchal message, says Pollock.
Some doctors opposed this video. Proof like 1. At that age the foetus has no cerebral cortex and
therefore no pain. 2. There can be no scream without air in the lungs, falls on deaf ears. Now that
we know that this video is in the realm of cultural representation, rather than medical evidence, the
author discusses how it works. (I think the more perplexing question is – WHY?)
Pollock argues that the film gains credibility in spite of its absurdity because we are used to this image
all around us. She says it condenses losses – she mentions examples from the western world- the
American imperialism and also what could be a common loss- the loss of innocence.
(For us the little helpless thing might signify the loss of citizenship, food, dignity.)
Pollock is surprised that feminists too have never questioned the authenticity of this
homunculus- little man.
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Beyond ‘already a baby’ to ‘almost a man’, says Pollack. And the way the image is presented –
Foetus at centre.
Mother at periphery (if not absent).
(The ‘baby’ (!) is just hanging in there- suspended in space without blood stream from mother.). The
Hobbesian view of ‘disconnected’, ‘solitary’ man is here extended to foetus.
The author draws on the work of Zoe Sofia who talks of lone survivor. This lone survivor foetus
takes our attention away from the fact that we are all at risk, because the very same people who are
fighting for this one little life are making plans for nuclear war!
Sofia Zoe says “The foetal images represents not life, but death”.
Appearance of objectivity/ Literal reality.
Pollock draws from Barthes  Photographic image appears be without code  a mechanical
representation of reality. This video is an example of it being presented so as to hide the fact that in
fact, the image is constructed using cultural reality and meanings.
So the vantage point of the foetus and all that is false. The only POV here, is that of the camera
and editor – we see what we are manipulated into seeing.
The other camera in the film is of course the USG itself. Is it to blame?
Pollock has addressed this. She says technologies have done good to individual women, and they
themselves do not play a part in this kind of cultural representations.
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Which in turn are due to the cultural climate. Even while doing this, she does not fail to critique
reproductive health practices themselves, particularly about this tendency to treat the foetus as an
individual ‘patient’ and then become hostile to its mother if this patient is at risk of abortion. (Foetal
identity as separate and autonomous blurs line between baby and foetus and further lower the viability
age.)
Pollack criticizes the routinization of USG imaging for all pregnant mothers despite there being
differences within the medical community about it. (The first picture in the baby album- this also
equated foetus image and baby photo. Pollock looks at it in terms of fetichisation.)
Too much surveillance, leads to too much caution and therefore too many caesarian sections, some
health advocates rightly argue (however, one does tend to feel that caution is better than regret)
Back to Image
Keller and Grontkowski have studied the philosophical traditions behind the ‘prevalence of gaze’ or
‘privileging the visual’.
Paradoxical function.
Sight, unlike other senses can maintain distance between knower and known. Modern optics sees eye
as camera obscura.
Vision distances us from the corporeal. In simple words, it Objectifies. (Objectification, as the author
tells us, is the masculine way.)
(One can’t help wondering whether this means that the masculine gaze has gone beyond her body
parts and is on the woman’s insides now)
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The paper quotes from A Sonar Look at an Unborn Baby, and likens USG examination of pregnant
women to naval surveillance of enemy ships!
Surveillance is attack. So to ‘correct for defect’ or more commonly caesarian section. (The section is
not an attack on the foetus but on mother?)
The caesarian section is also getting the foetus OUT of the womb. The author discusses why there
might be this need to ‘look into’ the foetus in utero. Mary O’ Brien has suggested that maybe due to
alienation of male seed from reproduction, men feel envy, fear, and inadequacy and therefore seek to
misappropriate children by inheritance laws. Mary O Brien calls this the ‘core impotency of the
potency principle’.
Now by technology, men are looking into, misappropriating the pregnancy in other ways. Are these
real power relations or just masculine fantasies asks Pollock. To avoid reductionism which sees
only these and ignores female response (or condenses all responses into Everywoman’s
Consciousness), the author proposes to look at how women look at these fetal images.
Many women found this a pleasant experience, were delighted to see the foetus, and made their
pregnancy a reality and so on. Pollack adds of course that these were ‘wanted’ pregnancies. Also, we
have to see that women are seeing what their cultural, historical, lived experience tells them.
So we have to bear in mind the differences along various axes and how these differences will inform
this pleasure.
Gena Corea’s Mother Machine and most pieces in Test Tube women shown women to be victims of
male technological intervention. However the author is pointing out that women like the predictability
that USG gives.
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Also, she adds -sometimes women themselves have generated demand for some procedures.
“Which is not to say that the technologies made have always met their needs” adds Pollack.
(Or made with their well-being in mind.)
One more question she raises 
We know that foetal movement (‘quickening’) leads to bonding. Then why is USG image different?
To call it artificial as opposed to ‘natural’ quickening is to ignore historic journey of the woman. .
It is very important to make the distinction between “my baby”  woman viewing  USG of own
foetus. And “the foetus”  public viewing  USG of an antiabortion film.
Pollack looks at another set of women viewing foetus as public- for example right-wing women who
are spreading bits and pieces of fetuses and harming the dignity of women who chose abortion, and
by turn, Pollack emphasizes, their own dignity.
Also, for them the foetus is representing their conservative views – teenage pregnancy, unmarried
pregnancy, abortion etc.
(
I think they make the foetus ‘speaking’ so that foetus can become their spokesperson)
A fiction in image.
Can fiction images offer some resistance to (manipulated) real images?
Speaking of technologies, one I test I definitely oppose is Sex-selection. And yet, wish to reiterate the
stand for right to abortion. Reading that Abortion is a “fundamental and non-negotiable choice”,
I wish to add that Abortion is a difficult and painful choice.
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Even the choice when the abortion is sex-determined, the choice and consent are often manufactured
and due to threat of violence towards herself or her baby. I see a mother’s consent to a sex-
selection as not her choice to give birth to a foetus of a particular gender , but her choice to
give birth to a child who will be allowed to live.
Foetal rights arguments are merely another attempt to “regulate the bodies of women, for they are
not concerned with poverty, large-scale pollution by large-scale industries and such other factors
which can equally affect the foetus.
These arguments are moving from area of theory to the area of image.
We need to understand visual images in reproductive health, the way they are generated, but more
importantly, the way in which they are imagined in the first place.
USG imagery is being used to present a mythic-patriarchal message. Proof that the age of the
depicted foetus has no cerebral cortex and therefore no pain. Or that nobody can talk without air in
the lungs, and the foetus is inside the uterus is brushed off in the emotional hold that foetal images
have on audiences.
Any rational argument falls on deaf ears.
(“Deaf ears which can hear only silent scream?” I ask.).
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About the Script, Briefly
This script is only a single scene in that it takes place in just one location, in one continuous time. In
that single location, it travels to a different room and also, to the womb. Yes, the foetus is speaking to
its mother, however, after critiquing the image of the ‘baby’ in pro-life propaganda, I do not choose a
similar representation. The nurse and the professor speak out the foetus’ lines. Characters that the
protagonist is familiar with, characters that we are used to seeing on stage. Characters that are plausible
in that location. Not a created, made up form. No manipulation by image. No manipulation by
Emotion. I do not counteract the awful pity that is sought to be evoked by the “maa mujhe bachao” by
inducing pity for the mother. There are no explanations, no excuses. “I could have allowed you to
live, but… I have the following problems.”! Or even one woman representing one particular ‘problem’
 writing multiple characters, and then, making up excuses suitable to type. However, as I have said
before here, the process of decision to abort is very complex and cannot be compartmentalized. I do
not want to write a film that lists out points to resist the manipulations that are inflicted. The writing
of such a script would be a manipulation in its own way. So the script decided that to not be a counter
propaganda, but instead be independent, be stand-alone; to not be a representation, but to be itself.
To be a small piece of fiction that will be interpreted differently by different people depending on
their background, their experiences and their state of mind. In most of our films, depicting mother-
child relationship, there is too much love. We know now that the family power structures are far from
being so cozy. Films have largely ignored this and focused on love. The script here turns this focus
around to focus Only on hatred. When we watch a film, we identify with the protagonist whose interest
is the greater good and whose actions take the plot further. In such complete identification comfort,
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where is the space to question? It was imperative therefore, that I write characters that we do not want
to identify with, or even want to empathize with.
Varkha and her future child are cruel people who want to destroy each other. Focus on hatred.
Yes. And yet, Oscar Wilde tells us how we destroy the thing we love the most. Well, the fun part in a
good film script, as in real life, is the Subtext.