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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

Is a baby ultrasound scan disgusting? One shopping centre thinks so.

119 replies

KateyKool · 02/04/2011 00:00

A friend of mine is trying to get a commercial run on a big screen at a well known shopping centre. It shows a live baby scan and is designed to highlight how the baby ultrasound scanner was created in the UK and how it's one of many inventions that have changed and saved lives. The idea is both brilliant and lovely and very sensitively done. It will also help benefit charities researching into pre birth conditions. So much would come from this.
This well know shopping centre is obviously 'more into money than mummies' and have refused to run the ad , they think a baby scan is disgusting. But are happy to take the ad dollar and run ads showing stick women, retouched images and the rest - you get the drift. Hypocritical?
All my friends now have boycotted the place.

OP posts:
bemybebe · 02/04/2011 12:02

I was a bag of nerves and tears after my mmc. Completely irrational in many respects. Shopping (window shopping that is) was something I was trying to take my mind off things. I would have totally lost it if something like a scan ad was push on me in a shopping mall. I would not have understood this reaction before, but I do now - some images are just too distressing to someone grieving.

Suppose it is NOT anti-abortion ad (btw totally inappropriate for the shopping centre imho). The shopping centre still has made the right decision. It cannot be just "more into money than mummies" as, I presume, you were prepared to pay the commercial rate. It chose not to upset some of their customers. Good on them!

DilysPrice · 02/04/2011 12:05

May I speak up for the people who are simply squicked out by ultra-sound foetus pictures (not my DCs' of course, theirs were different and full of personality and in no way resembled anything from HR Geiger).
There's a wall of them in the Science Museum and I always look away - I definitely would avoid a shopping centre with a big screen full, and no I'm not in my 70s.

thumbwitch · 02/04/2011 12:13

Bucharest - pmsl at "I thought I was going to give birth to a maris piper"

Having just had a mc I would probably find it rather uncomfortable to see an ultrasound scan in a shopping centre. It's too emotive - too many women are in/ have been in my current position and it would be unnecessarily upsetting for them to be faced with that image.

Whether this is or is not about pro-life propaganda (which I agree it probably is), it's NOT disgusting to show an ultrasound scan - but it could be very upsetting to a percentage of the shoppers, so I wouldn't want to see it being done.

InPraiseOfBacchus · 02/04/2011 12:17

This is overly emotive nonsense. I'm going to go ahead and assume this is a deliberate wind-up to get people all riled up over their breakfast cereal.

Underachieving · 02/04/2011 12:20

Psychology is also my thing.

What is evidently clear to me KateyKool is that you are selecting your words very carefully and giving us limited information. You blurr this a little by saying "I am not an analytical thinker", you could have fooled me, I am getting the distinct impression that you have thought very carefully about how to present to us something less than the whole picture to elicit the responses you hoped for in the first place. In order to be manipulative ones social analytic skills must be very strong. Thus I declare that you are an analytical thinker, analytical and manipulative.

You have been rumbled love.

Your agenda wont be welcomed here by cloak and dager methods.

lisianthus · 02/04/2011 12:23

Since when is "accountant" an insult? It's a GOOD thing to be a logical, sensible person who talks in a way other people can understand and has actual reasons for what you say and do.

(disclaimer: I am not an accountant.)

musicposy · 02/04/2011 12:25

bemybebe and thumbwitch, absolutely. Showing scans in a shopping centre is likely to distress a large number of people. Just like bemybebe, after my mmc last year I would have completely lost it in public if this was being shown. I had to look away even if I saw a pregnant woman, I was just in pieces.

A year on, things are better but it would still hurt to see it. I think the shopping centre were absolutely correct and there is an agenda behind this that OP isn't letting on.

SolarPanel · 02/04/2011 12:25

It's potentially too distressing to too many people.

balia · 02/04/2011 12:33

In the interests of 'transparency' I'd like the name of the shopping centre - anywhere that refuses to show emotive, manipulative anti-choice propaganda baby scans is somewhere I want to shop! And if this does not have an abortion agenda, then I would suggest, OP, that you and your mysteriously anonymous doctors and pre-birth charities are mistaken and that quite a few people would be hurt or upset by seeing scans in shopping centres, myself included. The shopping centre is right.

Underachieving · 02/04/2011 12:45

On a careful re-read of the thread we appear to be in near-unanimous agreement that the OP is dishonest.

Only someone with a grossly inflated view of thier own self-righteousness and ability to deceive would have posted this shit in the first place.

Go and get an IQ test OP, we are running rings round you, I don't think you realise how far short of the mark you are in terms of pulling off what you set out to mislead us with.

You are a poor advert indeed for your cause.

frgr · 02/04/2011 12:46

I think the thread hasn't gone the way the OP intended. Too many independant/analytical thinkers here, perhaps?

OP, come back to address some of the clear, logical answers your - frankly, bizarre - posts have prompted.

Casserole · 02/04/2011 13:46

This thread is very bizarre. But I'm glad the OP started it. Otherwise I wouldn't have just had such a good laugh at Bucharest and her uterus full of root veg Grin

emptyshell · 02/04/2011 14:26

Both me and my husband would be very likely to be incredibly distressed by scan photos (I adblock the hell out of them on the net) after the silent miscarriage experience... the image of the empty sac is indelibly seared onto my mind and my heart, my husband almost collapsed with the shock when he saw it and I, like many others cannot deal with images of scan pictures at all these days.

Of course our feelings don't matter... we ain't mummies (or daddies). But I wouldn't be shopping anywhere that was thrusting a very distressing reminder into my face - and I'd be letting them know why.

libelulle · 02/04/2011 14:32

Spot on, Underachieving.

If you have to resort to dimwittedly transparent deception, omissions and half-truths to get people to agree with you, that should be telling you something OP. How stupid do you think we are?

FabbyChic · 02/04/2011 14:35

Sue is my first name, but my ID here is the same as my eBay one. I don't hide behind an ID.

Your add in the shopping centre will not generate money for the shopping centre as you are not advertising something they can buy within that centre, hence the reason it is not being run. There is no other reason not to run it.

CJ2010 · 02/04/2011 14:37

Is the OP very strange?

NormanTebbit · 02/04/2011 14:40

There's been alot of these threads lately, yesterday I was reading one about the morning after pill which seemed to equate it with early abortion.

All rather strange.

wannaBe · 02/04/2011 15:02

why on earth would anyone want to see pictures of ultrasounds while walking through a shopping centre? Even if you take those that have had bad news after an ultrasound out of the equasion, surely any normal thinking person, rather than taking on board the intended message would just think it was weird?

When I was pg no-one else was allowed to see my scan picture because, as I couldn't see, I didn't want anyone else to see my baby before I did (apart from dh obv). But my cousin's gf was pg at the same time as me, and her ILs asked for a copy of her scan picture, which they then had framed and hung on their wall. weird.

I also think people putting scan pictures on fb and the like is odd. A friend of mine put it well - he said: "why would you want to hang a picture like that up there - it's not even really a picture of the baby - it just looks like an xray."

thekidsmom · 02/04/2011 15:28

OK so I'm going to stick up for accountants now - beleive it or not, OP, some of us are both mums AND accountants at the same time!

Why do you presume that the decision was financially based? The way any commerical organisation works is to analyse the pros and cons of a proposal, inlcuding the financial aspects, and then to make a decision, usually by a commercial director or by a board of several professions. They'll have looked at reputaitonal risk, market positioning, the views of thier clientele as well as the finanical benefit. They could have ruled this out on any of those grounds, you'll probably never know.

You sound a little naive about the way the decision has likely been made - if it is financial and not reputational (which I would guess is the reason) you could improve your finanical offer and they might reconsider. But if its an objection on different grounds then the ££ is likely to have nothing to do with it.

Reality · 02/04/2011 15:33

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Bucharest · 02/04/2011 15:37

Would you like a resume? Grin

OP wants to put prolifey scan videos (or something) up in Arndale Centre. 4 pages of MNers think she is loon. I carried a potato in my uterus.

LaWeasel · 02/04/2011 15:38

I would say that assuming this was a pro-life campaign (since the idea that it is to encourage higher ultrasound take-up is bonkersly pointless) you were told that it is disgusting to use ultrasound pictures to emotionally blackmail women was 'disgusting' because it is IS morally disgusting.

HTH.

DuelingFanjo · 02/04/2011 15:40

got to be a pro-life agenda I agree.

DuelingFanjo · 02/04/2011 15:45

is your friend Missy Reilly Smith?

NB don't google and explore the results as there are some graphic anti-abortion videos etc when you do.

bullet234 · 02/04/2011 15:48

"- if this is designed to highlight how UK inventions have saved lives, what other machines/inventions will be part of the campaign?"
I'd like to ask that question as well. I'd also like to know what organisation is behind this. Because surely if you are lauding an advertising company for promoting UK inventions, you'd give a link to the advertising company and its work. Especially if you wanted to promote it, after the shopping centre had refused.

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