Platform pregnancy and digital birth: social (de)construction of bodies and online discourses on three-dimensional ultrasound images in the transition to parenthood

Three-dimensional (3D)and four-dimensional (4D) ultrasound technologies have evolved from their clinical applications to become integral components of in digital platforms, private commercial settings, and online communities. This article explores how online discourses pertaining to 3D and 4D foetal ultrasound images contribute to the reconfiguration of parental wellbeing during the transition to parenthood. The study draws upon feminist science and technology studies and digital sociology in order to demonstrate how pregnancy, foetal visibility, and parental subjectivities are increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures, and to conceptualises the practices of transition to parenthood as part of a broader process of “platform pregnancy” and “digital birth”. The article employs a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to empirically study the content of posts and images shared on two UK-based parenting forums. The analysis focuses on how parents — predominantly expectant mothers — describe, interpret, and emotionally negotiate their encounters with 3D/4D ultrasound scans, and how these experiences are collectively discussed and reframed within online environments. The findings demonstrate that 3D/4D ultrasound images exhibit an ambivalent role in parental wellbeing. Whilst often anticipated as sources of reassurance, fostering bonds, and facilitating emotional connections with the foetus, these experiences can also generate feelings of anxiety, discomfort, and frustration, particularly when the actual experience of viewing diverges from culturally idealised representations of the foetus and the concept of ideal parenthood. Online forums have been shown to function as affective infrastructures in which these tensions are negotiated through storytelling, peer support, humour, and the circulation of images. This enables the collective management of uncertainty and emotional distress. The article presents a conceptual argument that the circulation of ultrasound images on digital platforms contributes to the emergence of the “digital foetus”, defined as a hybrid entity produced through the entanglement of medical imaging, parental affect, and platform-mediated visibility. This process anticipates social recognition prior to biological birth, thereby giving rise to what is termed “digital birth”. The article employs the concept of “digital timescapes”, the article to demonstrate how digital technologies compress, accelerate, and reorganise the temporalities of pregnancy, thereby reshaping the rhythms of anticipation, waiting, and becoming a parent. The article contributes to sociological debates on reproduction, embodiment and parenthood in the digital age by foregrounding the interplay between digital technologies, visual culture and wellbeing.