SEEING your child’s face for the first time is one of life’s most treasured moments — but nine months can feel like a long time to wait.

    Now a company is offering pregnant women the opportunity to create a 3-D sculpture of their unborn child from ultrasound images taken inside the womb.

    At the moment, parents usually rely on black-and-white pictures from routine scans to imagine what their babies will look like. But the new technology uses more detailed images to create a lifelike plastic model of infants’ faces, heads and hands.

    It has proved popular since it was introduced two years ago in the U.S. and Japan and is now being offered in the U.K. for the first time by an Estonian company, Wolfprint 3-D.

    It costs up to £300 (US$472) and involves women having a detailed 3-D ultrasound scan to produce images clear enough to make a model. Scans can be taken between 24 and 34 weeks into pregnancy, although the optimum time is around 27 weeks. At this point, the baby’s face has filled out and features are more discernible.

    Hannah Bramley, 27, is 35 weeks pregnant with her third child, a daughter, and chose to have a sculpture made by Wolfprint after having a detailed scan at a local clinic, Miracle in Progress, in Loughborough, Leicestershire. She paid £80 for the private 3-D scan when she was 28 weeks pregnant, and a further £150 for the sculpture to be made – but said it was “money well spent.”(SD-Agencies)