"The double text of The Silent Scream, noted earlier, recapitulates this historical paradox of photographic images: their simultaneous power as purveyors of fantasy and illusion yet also of "objectivist 'truth."' "'When Nathanson claims to be presenting an abortion from the "vantage point of the [fetus],"the image's appearance of seamless movement through real time-and the technologic allure of the video box, connoting at once "advanced medicine" and "the news"-render his claim "true to life." Yet he also purveys a myth, for the fetus-if it had any vantage point-could not possibly experience itself as if dangling in space, without a woman's uterus and body and bloodstream to support it. In fact, every image of a fetus we are shown, including The Silent Scream, is viewed from the standpoint neither of the fetus nor of the pregnant woman but of the camera. The fetus as we know it is a fetish. Barbara Katz Rothman observes that "the fetus in utero has become a metaphor for 'man' in space, floating free, attached only by the umbilical cord to the spaceship. But where is the mother in that metaphor? She has become empty space."' Inside the futurizing spacesuit, however, lies a much older image. For the autonomous, free-floating fetus merely extends to gestation the Hobbesian view of born human beings as disconnected, solitary individuals. It is this abstract individualism, effacing the pregnant woman and the fetus's dependence on her, that gives the fetal image its symbolic transparency, so that we can read in it ourselves, our lost babies, our mythic secure past."