"The most disturbing thing about how people receive The Silent Scream, and indeed all the dominant fetal imagery, is their apparent acceptance of the image itself as an accurate representation of a real fetus. The curled-up profile, with its enlarged head and fin like arms, suspended in its balloon of amniotic fluid, is by now so familiar that not even most feminists question its authenticity (as opposed to its relevance).I went back to trace the earliest appearance of these photos in popular literature and found it in the June 1962 issue of Look (along with Life, the major mass-circulating "picture magazine" of the period). It was a story publicizing a new book, The First Nine Months of Life, and it featured the now-standard sequel of pictures at one day, one week, seven weeks, and so forth. In every picture the fetus is solitary, dangling in the air (or its sac) with nothing to connect it to any life-support system but "a clearly defined umbilical cord. "In every caption it is called "the baby"(even at forty-four days) and is referred to as "he"-until the birth, that is, when "he" turns out to be a girl. Nowhere is there any reference to the pregnant woman, except in a single photograph at the end showing the newborn baby lying next to the mother, both of them gazing off the page, allegedly at "the father."From their beginning, such photographs have represented the fetus as primary and autonomous, the woman as absent or peripheral."