By Dave Andrusko

I guess it proves the human equivalent of the idiom that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. 

Snopes’ Fact Check asked “Does This Image Show Fetus Smiling in Mother’s Womb?”— and, more specifically, it posed the claim to be evaluated as whether “An image shows a sonogram of a fetus smiling in his mother’s womb.”

Snopes’ Jordan Liles judged the claim “True.”

He writes, on May 31, 2023, “LifeNews posted an image to Facebook that purportedly showed a fetus smiling in his mother’s womb. The image also displayed a picture of what was believed to be the  baby smiling after he was born. The caption read, ‘Baby before birth. Baby after.’”

A reader asked whether the photo[s] were Photoshopped.

Liles started out by looking to see if he could find other stories that featured the photos.

A story in 2014 in Manchester Evening News gave the best search result. The story was about the June 30 birth of David Hargreaves, the same little boy whose photo the reader had asked Snopes to verify had not been altered. Liles continues:

At the time, Leo’s parents, Leighton Hargreaves and Amy Cregg, were living in Church, a village in Lancashire, England.

The article from the Evening News featured an un-cropped version of the sonogram with a date stamp of May 13, 2014, and said that it had been taken at 31 weeks into Cregg’s pregnancy.

Liles discusses some additional  technical checks that were conducted to be sure that one (or both) photos was untouched. They passed the test. Then he quoted again from the Manchester Evening News:

A spokesman for Babybond Ultrasound Direct in Burnley, which performed the scan, said: “Our sonographer who scanned Amy and her gorgeous baby was overwhelmed at her smiley baby throughout the entire scan.

“I think we can safely say that Amy’s baby has been the smiliest baby we’ve ever seen.”