When I attended pregnancy scans a decade ago, the best the sonographer could do to involve this blind expectant mum was to turn up the volume on the heartbeat. But now, parents like me can receive tactile 3D models created from their scans, allowing them to have a special moment with their unborn baby. Reece Finnegan-Knight, who has been blind since his teens, is one of the first people to experience a 3D-printed model of his baby's scan with his wife, Sophy, as part of a new pilot scheme.
At their routine 12-week scan, Sophy had attempted to describe what she was seeing for Reece, but he struggled to feel involved in the moment. Afterwards, when the couple showed the sonogram to their loved ones, Reece said it felt like "friends and family knew more about my baby than I did". But he said the 20-week scan was more positive.
"The sonographer described everything to me, and explained why what she was seeing meant that everything looked good," he says. They also now have the model of their 20-week scan picture, through the scheme by the charity Guide Dogs. "I can't stop feeling it to be honest," Reece says.
"It's so nice to be able to fully access something without the need for other people's descriptions or interpretations. It has enough detail that I know what things are and it just makes everything feel more real." It's an innovation which has made me reflect on my own experiences of pregnancy and parenting. Before my partially sighted husband and I started trying for kids, I researched absolutely everything it would entail, from how to use specialist apps to read pregnancy test results, to the bells and squeaky shoes I could use to keep tabs on a fast-moving toddler.
I immediately discovered a community of people in my position ready to share their wisdom, and a host of tried and tested workarounds for almost every scenario. But a decade on, there are even more advances, and I've spoken to other blind parents to find out the best ways they tackle the challenges they face. For Kim and Sean Randall, who have a teenager and an 11-month-old, the progress of technology is one of the biggest changes they have noticed in the 15 years between the births of their children.
For their youngest child, maternity notes came in an app which could be accessed with a screen reader on their phone, rather than being handwritten in the traditional NHS blue book. Kim says it put her on more of an equal footing with other expectant parents, and helped her feel more in control. "I could check the notes, and any test results, when I wanted rather than waiting to have them read to me," she says.
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