People are usually surprised when I tell them that I have never had a prenatal ultrasound despite having 3 children. Ultrasound is a standard medical procedure that most pregnant women undergo at least once during pregnancy if not 2 times or more. Even birthing centers that specialize in low risk pregnancies such as where I received my prenatal care, recommend at least a single ultrasound.
It is never a good idea to submit to any medical test without first understanding exactly what you are getting yourself into.   Just because nearly every single pregnant woman gets an ultrasound or that most medical practicioners say that they are safe doesn’t mean that you should have one or that they really are safe.
Like many things in life, “safe” is certainly a matter of interpretation!
Make sure you have all the facts in hand before you judge whether or not the standard use of prenatal ultrasound is, in fact, truly safe for the precious life you are carrying inside you!
The experience that first got me very suspicious of ultrasound occurred when I was pregnant with my first child. Â I remember that the baby jumped and seemed extremely disturbed every time I had a prenatal visit and the midwife used a doppler to check the heartbeat.
Why is my baby so upset by this doppler, I thought?   Intuitively, it seemed that something was just not right about the overly casual use of this device.
Why didn’t the midwife just use a fetascope instead, I wondered?
I went home after one of those prenatal visits determined to find out the truth.  I started researching and was shocked to find out that dopplers are a form of ultrasound!  I also discovered that ultrasounds in general are not the innocuous test that prenatal caregivers would lead you to believe.
Ultrasounds Have Never Been Proven Safe
The American Medical Association warns against unnecessary exposure to ultrasound.   A number of studies have indicated probable danger with this routine prenatal test.  One of the most concerning for me was a study reported in the journal Epidemiology in 2001 that showed that the chance of subtle brain damage increases dramatically in male babies whose mothers get prenatal ultrasounds.
Doctors have long known that left handedness in a child that is not genetically determined can be an indicator of brain damage.  When the rate of left handedness in children rises above 9% for right handed parents and 35% for left handed parents, scientists know that some form of negative impact on neural development has occurred.
In this study, the rate of left handedness for boys increased by 30% above historical genetic rates when a mother was exposed to prenatal ultrasound.  The incidence of left handedness was especially pronounced for mothers who had received more than one prenatal scan.
Left handedness has been increasing in recent decades and this puzzling rise beyond normal and historical genetic rates could very well be related to the common use of prenatal ultrasound.  The fetus’ brain undergoes critical brain development even very late in pregnancy (preterm babies are 5 times more likely to be left handed).   Moreoever, the brain of a male fetus develops at a slower rate than that of a female leaving boys at particular risk for ultrasonic injury.
The Ultrasound/Speech Delay Link
Another study that gave me pause and eventually persuaded me to opt out of all forms of ultrasound – even use of the doppler, was a study in 1993 and reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.  This study examined 72 children ages 2-8 who were suffering from speech delay of unknown cause.    These speech delay children were twice as likely as a control group to have been exposed to ultrasound in the womb.
Delayed speech is a likely indicator of sub-optimal conditions for development during gestation and ultrasound exposure seems to be linked to these less than ideal conditions for the fetus.
How Would Ultrasound Delay Speech?
Ultrasound as a potential reason for the increase in pediatric speech problems in recent years has a very likely cause.  This cause would be the incredible loudness that is produced in the womb as the ultrasound waves bounce around the uterus.
How loud, you may ask?
How about louder than your power mower, a motorcycle 25 feet away from you or a jet flyover at only 1000 feet?  How about LOUDER than the last rock concert you attended where your ears were ringing for a day or two afterward?
Yes, THAT loud!
Can you imagine the intense fright and the spike in stress hormones the baby experiences from an ultrasound not to mention the likelihood of damage to the little developing ears from 100-120 decibel ultrasound waves?
Oh, and by the way, hearing loss begins with exposure to sound at only 90-95 decibels, much LOWER than the sound the baby would hear from a routine ultrasound or a doppler heartbeat check.
Beware Continuous Electronic Fetal Monitoring During Labor
A favorite way for a hospital to monitor how baby is handling the stress of Mom’s labor is by strapping an electronic fetal monitor to her belly.   Be aware that this device is ultrasound and when it is strapped to your body, your poor child is not only enduring the stress of the birth process itself but also dealing with 100-120 decibel continuous, blaring sound at the same time!
I have no doubt that someday a study will finally be done that shows that babies that are subjected to the barbaric insult of electronic fetal monitoring during birth have more speech delay and brain damage induced left handedness than any control groups.
Just say no to electronic fetal monitoring and if your hospital or OB tries to talk you into the so called “benefits” of this practice, then find another OB!  Better yet, have your baby with a midwife at home or in a birthing center where such devices are never allowed through the front door.
More Reasons to Skip the Ultrasound
One of the best articles I’ve read on the dangers of ultrasound was written by Dr. Sarah Buckley MD in 2009.   In this article, Dr. Buckley gives a thorough rundown of the potential biological risks to the fetus from prenatal ultrasound as well as the studies that give pause for even considering such a procedure during pregnancy.
This article by Dr. Buckley is loaded with information.  If you are questioning the safety of ultrasound, I highly recommend that you dive in and read it thoroughly.  This blog only discusses the reasons why I personally chose to opt out of prenatal scans and use of the doppler.  There is much more to be told with regard to this story and more serious problems associated with ultrasounds such as a potential link with autism.
What Will Be Your Choice?
As mentioned above, after considering the biological dangers to my unborn children, I opted out of all prenatal ultrasound scans.  I also stopped allowing the use of a doppler during prenatal visits and asked the midwife to use a fetascope instead.   There is a drawback to using only the fetascope – you can’t hear the baby’s heartbeat until Mom is about 22 weeks gestation.
The inconvenience of waiting to hear the heartbeat so much later in the pregnancy seemed an easy trade-off for the peace of mind!
Note: I did allow the very brief use of a doppler during labor as use of a fetascope during the natural birth process does not work well when Mom is moving around a lot or is in and out of a laboring tub.
Even when I was 38 weeks pregnant with my third child and the midwife really wanted to do an ultrasound because it appeared my baby had stopped growing, I refused.   I knew intuitively that the baby was just fine despite my advanced maternal age.
Guess what?  I was right, the baby was indeed fine and was simply 2 inches shorter in length than my previous pregnancies which accounted for my much smaller belly measurements during the third trimester.   To this day, I have never regretted not getting any ultrasounds and am very grateful that I trusted my instincts early to question what was happening with the doppler exams.  I believe skipping the ultrasounds is a big reason why my children all were articulating complete sentences very clearly at a very early age.  Of course, nutrient dense diet played a huge role too!!   But, what good is diet if you undo it with damaging medical tests?
What were your reasons for or against getting prenatal ultrasound scans?
Update:  Medical critic and researcher Jim West has recently published a book detailing 50 in utero CAUSAL human studies from China that prove irrefutably the high risk of prenatal ultrasound even at low frequencies.  This article on ultrasound dangers contains more information on this research that Mothers must be made aware of in prenatal examination rooms.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Hi Sarah, I am left handed too!! Actually, I write left handed but do most other things right handed or with either hand.
I so appreciate your blogs. Very informative. I have had two births at a great birthing center with midwives who did everything to avoid interventions, but they still did all the routine ultrasounds, now I have some great information to consider the next time. However, being left handed (it runs in my family) I have to wonder if more people are left handed today because they aren't forced to be right handed.
Hi Martha, ultrasound to assess a kidney situation should be fine. I haven't seen any contraindications for this.
My chiropractor–a smart man indeed–always told me to push off ultrasounds until the baby was into the 2nd semester because of the very same reasons you listed. It was so hard to take his advice though the first time you walk into the ob/gyn office and they say, "Wanna take a peek at your baby?" Of course I did!
Well, we did have a few more after that, including 2 high-risk assessments, and everything was fine so I had no more after 23 wks, but I was offered a free one by a parent of a student with whom I worked. Intuitively I turned it down. I am so glad I did, because it might have shown that my little one was "small for gestational age" and thrown me out of the birth center. While that might have been good info to know, even without knowing about that, she had a perfectly healthy and natural birth, safely at a birth center, and I'm glad for the unnecessary medical intervention late in the game.
However, I bemoan the fact (based on all these studies), that for future, Lord Willing pregnancies, I will forever be labeled "high risk" and require several ultrasounds. I guess it's SOP now but it seems like a LOT.
Thankfully I know so much more about nutrition and real food now that next time around I will have hopefully have a healthier baby and pregnancy!
Are ultrasounds outside of pregnancy safe? My little boy has periodic kidney ultrasounds for cysts–just to monitor their growth.
My problem isn't with whether women choose to have the ultrasound or not. Every woman, pregnancy and family is different. No one should feel guilty for what they did or didn't do, provided they weighed the benefits and risks and made a choice based on what was best for their situation at that time.
My problem is with the fact that most doctors don't INFORM you of risks for things they consider routine. I am pregnant now and can say with all certainty that the OB's office does not inform you of the risks associated with their routine tests or monitoring. They do however tell you all the things that could be wrong that the test or monitoring will possibly indicate. The nurse recently tried to guilt trip me because I declined tests, and doppler. The only reason I even knew I could decline them was my previous midwife was passionate about informed consent/decline. I did however choose to have the ultrasound at my first visit because we had no idea how far along I was or if I was a canidate for VBAC based on healing from the c-section and number of babies. Once the risk of my pregnancy was established, the was not needed for me. However, that is for ME to decided based on MY situation. As I said, every family, woman, pregnancy and situation is different.
This information is not common knowledge. Every person has the right, and a responsibility, to make an informed decision about their medical care. We can not have meaningful change to the health care industry nor the declining health of our citizens until they are empowered with information to choose for themselves. No law, insurance or reform will have any kind of meaningful impact until patients are given the tools necessary to make truly informed consent/decline choices.
I have to add, that although, not knowing the potential risks of ultrasound, that even though I had 3 done during my pregnancy, my daughter is very advanced. We always ate well, but not a higher fat and grassfed diet until she was 10-12months old. But, she was talking by then. She's now 2 and sings entire songs, knows the alphabet and upper and lower case letters, etc… I feel that diet has influenced her for good, and she's now getting a lot of the fats, etc she needs to make these brain connections at a young age. Either way, I don't feel "guilty" for having ultrasounds done, because I didn't know better at the time- but now that i'm more educated, as all of us are after reading this, that we can go forward having more knowledge, and making more informed choices for our families. 🙂 Thank you again Sarah, for sharing what you have learned.
I feel like this is a what comes first the chicken or the egg situation. The babys who generally have more ultrasounds are usually the one's who are categorized as "high risk" for whatever reason. So is it the US that is causing the problem or is it the reason FOR the ultrasound? I think that is very hard to tease out. Also Alix, there was a more recent study out about twins that showed no long term difference in IQ once twins reach adulthood.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W4M-4RR831Y-1&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1477327504&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=00372f93d287c1c729e995c86898f796&searchtype=a
Check it out!
Sarah. Mom to a singleton and a set of twins.
Hi Anonymous, if I had been in the same situation as you, I probably would have done the same thing. Ultrasounds can be very helpful for high risk situations such as a baby requiring a blood transfusion in utero. I just wish doctors were more selective as to where and when the use this device as it is used way to casually in most instances even when the Mom is clearly very low risk.
Sarah it’s saved more lives than you can imagine. Unless you are a dolphin or bat you cannot hear it. The frequency is beyoud our hearing range. Also the transducer pulses out the sound waves and is a receiver 99% Of the time inorder to create the picture. I have been in this field for 30 years and you would be surprised at the things we find during a ” routine” ultrasound in the 18th week of pregnancy. Neural tube defects, GI defects, genetic defects, urinary tract defects , facial defects…I could go on. Most of these things were NEVER diagnosed prenatally before ultrsound exams. The problem is the doctor’s offices that use nonregistered, nontrained techs to do the exam. They take a couple of measurements of the head and leg tell you the sex of your baby and charge you the full pricefor an exam that is well below the standard of care. What you need tobe aware of is who is doing and interpreting your exam. Are theyy registered on OB sonography? Is the doctor interpreting it know how to even “read” an ultrasound?
Not to knock ultrasounds, but most of the defects you mentioned (except for the utmost severe) can be detected easily after birth and fixed, and others are so severe that no intervention would have helped anyway. What’s left are a few cases that actually required ultrasound for success, and still many of those would be medically indicated by a low fetal pulse (detected by a fetoscope) or abnormalities on screening blood tests or high-risk factors in the family. If there are any possible harmful effects, then not every family should have to undergo ultrasound. It’s not about trying to get people not to do it, it’s about making sure people have the CHOICE to evaluate the risk for themselves and not be judged for their personal decisions. It’s almost impossible to have a hospital birth now without some form of ultrasound being used. We cannot detect ultrasound, but once it vibrates through tissue, there are resonant waves of lower frequencies that possibly could be detected, and besides that, pulsing energy through living tissue has effects, whether we can hear it or not.
I don't disagree with the position you have taken. That said, ultrasound was medically necessary for both of my children as I became RH sensitized during my 1st pregnancy and it was used to monitor the health of both of my children and if and when they would need a blood transfusion in utero (which my daughter required twice before birth and twice after birth). My son had many ultrasounds during my 3rd trimester. My daughter had ultrasounds at least every 2 weeks starting at 18 weeks. Both of my children are fine and have not shown any delays with speach (or anything else). I credit ultrasound as being one of the tools of modern science that actually saved my daughter's life and ensured that she is a healthy and happy little 3yo girl. So … there is a time and place for ultrasound and it appears to not have harmed either of my children – which is hopefully calming knews for those of you that are reading this and are faced with a situation such as I was where your unborn baby has to have a multitude of medically necessary ultrasounds.