Baby brains.

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday. It went well, and Elinore still appears to be doing just fine. My doctor spent the better part of the appointment looking at a sonogram of her brain, then he took her heart beat, measured her head, and pronounced us good to go for another month.

It hit me as I was driving back to work how completely crazy it is that we have a machine that enables us to see into a mother's womb to the extent that we can look at an unborn baby's brain.

That's crazy, right? And also amazing. It is amazing that we have this technology and people smart enough to use it. Doctor Wheeler said her brain looked "beautiful" and "perfect". I wouldn't know what a perfect brain looked like for anything.  I am also skeptical that a brain could ever look beautiful...but I'll go with his professional opinion.

As amazing as this technology is, I know that the information it provides can be, and often is, used for bad purposes. The doctor looks at the unborn child and the womb and tells the parent that there is a defect in this child and the parents choose to abort their baby, instead of dealing with the burden of raising a disabled child. This is the downside of the amazing ability of the human brain to invent new and wondrous machines.

But for those of us who have had trouble in the past delivering a baby to term, there is nothing more beautiful or reassuring than seeing a little tiny baby brain, the movement of an arm, a beating heart, and a little face on that sonogram machine.