For the person holding the picture
Real scan or novelty print? How to tell
Maybe a friend posted a scan that looks a lot like one you've seen before. Maybe someone handed you a printout and you have a nagging feeling. Here's what's on a genuine scan, and the usual tells of a novelty one.
One caveat before the list. None of these signs is proof on its own. Clinics use different machines, and some print almost nothing on the image. If the scan matters to you, the honest move is to ask the person, kindly, not to run it through a checklist behind their back.
What a real printout usually carries
- A header with the clinic or hospital name, the patient's name or ID, the date and time, and the machine's settings. You'll often see "MI" and "TIs" or "TIb" followed by small numbers. Those are safety indexes that ultrasound machines show on screen, and they end up on most prints.
- The image itself, usually fan-shaped (an abdominal scan) or a narrower cone (an early internal scan). It's grainy. Real scans are rarely crisp.
- A depth scale along one edge, with tick marks in centimeters.
- Measurements, if the sonographer took any: crown-rump length (CRL) early on, head and thigh-bone measurements later, and a gestational age worked out from them.
Signs it's a novelty print
The picture has been seen before
Most fakes reuse a small set of sample images. A reverse image search (Google Lens, Bing Visual Search or TinEye) on the photo will often turn up the same scan on shop pages, stock sites or someone else's post from years ago. It's the single most useful check, and it takes about thirty seconds.
The numbers don't agree with each other
On a real scan, the measurements and the stated age match, because the machine works out one from the other. A print that says 8 weeks next to a baby with a clear profile and little hands is wrong; at 8 weeks the embryo is roughly the size of a raspberry and looks like a curved bean. Our week by week page has the rough sizes.
The text sits on the image, not in it
Machine text is part of the screen it was printed from: same font, same grain, same blur. Edited text is often a little too sharp, a slightly different font, or perfectly straight on an image that's slightly tilted. A name that's suspiciously clean is a common giveaway.
Details that no clinic would print
Cute fonts, a baby's name, "Congratulations", a heart drawn around the baby. Some clinics do add a short message for keepsake prints, so this alone isn't proof, but combined with a reused image it usually settles it.
The paper
Clinic printouts are usually on thermal paper: thin, slightly glossy, and it fades over a few years, especially in sunlight. Some novelty sellers now use thermal paper too, so a print on glossy photo paper points to a novelty, while thermal paper tells you nothing either way.
If you're a professional who has been handed one (an employer, a school, an insurer), don't play detective with the picture. Ask for what your process normally asks for, such as a note signed by a clinician, and verify it the usual way. A scan image was never good evidence of anything, real or not.
If you find out it's fake
Most of the time it's a joke you weren't let in on yet, or an announcement prop from a couple who didn't want to share their real scan. Both are common and neither is sinister. If it's being used to pressure you, to get money, or to stop you from leaving a relationship, that's different. Talk to someone you trust; in the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) takes calls about pregnancy-related coercion too.