There are a number of reasons we discontinued patient shielding:

• Although patient shielding has been used for more than 70 years, today’s better equipment uses much less radiation and operates differently. Most modern X-ray, fluoroscopy and CT machines automatically determine how much radiation to use based on the body part being imaged. If a shield gets in the way, it can trick the machine into using more radiation than is needed.
• Modern digital X-ray systems use 95% less radiation than film X-rays used. The amount of radiation used in most imaging exams is so small that the risk to you or your child is either very small or zero. Shields provide negligible protection.
• We also know more about how radiation affects the body and that some parts of the body, such as the testicles and ovaries, are less sensitive to radiation than we used to think.

When the reproductive organs are far away from the body part being imaged, there’s no benefit from using shielding. When the body part receiving X-rays is close to reproductive organs, a shield may cover up body parts that your doctor needs to be able to see. If this happens, we may have to repeat the exam.

Since the 1950s, people were concerned that radiation might damage sperm or eggs and that this damage would be passed down to future children. However, this has never been seen in humans even after many generations (years) of studying it closely. This is true even for people who’ve been exposed to much larger amounts of radiation than what’s used in medical imaging.

We have equipment that can give us better information than ever before and can get good images using much less radiation than in the past. Placing shielding over your belly can reduce the quality of the exam if it gets into the image and in some cases can increase the overall dose from the exam. Since shielding your belly provides no benefit to your baby, it’s better to not do it.

We don’t recommend using lead shielding during imaging exams. Some exams can never be done using a shield because the shield would cover up parts of the body we need to see. But, if you insist that we use a shield, we’ll honor your request if it’s possible to do so without compromising the exam.

Your child’s doctor wants an image to better see what’s going on inside your child’s body. This exposes your child to a little bit of radiation. Your doctor has thought about the benefits and risks to your child and decided that the benefit from having the imaging information is much higher than the radiation risk, which is very small or zero. Because you aren’t being imaged, there’s no need for you to get any radiation, so we give you an apron to wear.

In April 2019, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) released a position statement outlining reasons for limiting the routine use of fetal and gonadal shielding in medical imaging. This position statement has since been endorsed by the American College of Radiology, the Canadian Organization of Medical Physics, the Health Physics Society, the Canadian Association of Radiologists, the Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine and the Image Gently Alliance.