“Gummy Bears” and “Teddy Grahams”: Ultrasounds as religious biopower in Crisis Pregnancy Centers

Scholars, activists, and medical professionals critique Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) for disseminating medical misinformation and deceptive counseling practices. Yet much of the scholarship examining CPC's counseling and medical practices relies upon discourse analyses or surreptitious approaches. I use observational data from client appointments in an evangelical CPC in the U.S. West and in-depth interviews with clients and staff to explore how guided ultrasounds construct the experience of pregnancy. I describe the “medical model of care” at this CPC and then analyze how the ultrasound becomes a socio-religious practice that shapes the social and physical experience of pregnancy. I argue this is a unique form of ‘religious biopower’ (Foucault 1990). Importantly, clients overwhelming describe these appointments as positive and point to how centers seemingly fill a void of care in the healthcare system. These findings reveal processes whereby faith-based, antiabortion organizations produce a ‘digital quickening’ through ostensibly neutral medical technologies of visualization, reinforce conservative discourses about fetal personhood and motherhood, and spread medical misinformation.