October 29, 2025 • 27 mins
Ever feel like tech is actually fueling your worries? This week, we explore the murky world of parenting tech and pregnancy apps with Amanda Hess, who is the author of “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age” and a writer-at-large for the New York Times covering technology and internet culture. Amanda shares with Karah how pregnancy changed her relationship to technology, discusses the blurry line between pregnancy tech and eugenics, and explains why pregnancy apps aren't actually that helpful.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tex Stuff. I'm as Volocian here with Cara Prices.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Has social media ever made you feel superstitious or paranoid?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I mean I've dipped my toe into the world of
social media Instagram. I'm getting push notifications about being bold
and about being depressed. I know I'm bold, am I
depressed too? That makes me feel a bit paranoid that
the algorithm may know more about me than I know
about myself.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I similarly get fed things that I've searched for that
I don't want to know about myself. Why do you ask, Well,
I feel like this is kind of a universal state.
This tech induce paranoia, like most people can relate to it.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Nobody would be like, yeah, you know, I just think
social media is just such a fun, clear place to
rest my head. And I actually spoke about this feeling
with Amanda Hess, who is a writer at large for
The New York Times covering technology and internet culture.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
She actually she wrote a fascinating column in the last
couple of weeks actually about somebody who live streamed their
birth on Twitch. So I'm very interested in her in
her take in general. In the story, she finds.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
She's super smart, and I would definitely check out her
book if you haven't checked it out. It's called Second Life,
Having a Child in the Digital Age. And she said
that even though she's normally really rational, getting pregnant changed
her relationship to technology and kind of fed into a
lot of superstitious feelings that I think most women feel
(01:39):
went pregnant.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Pregnancy is such a time of imagination and conjecture, and
I had never been pregnant before. I didn't have many
close friends who had undergone pregnancy, and so I was
just turning to the Internet for everything, Like I ate
a piece of turkey that tasted bad, Like what's going
(02:04):
to happen? Like do I need to make myself throw up?
Do I need to go to the hospital? I was
like constantly googling stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
And Amanda's superstitions were complicated by the fact that her
pregnancy actually became complex.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
When I was about seven months pregnant, I had a
routine ultrasound where my doctor, as he put it, saw
something he didn't like, and at first my doctors didn't
know what it was, but he suggested that he thought
it might be a genetic syndrome called beck with Weedaman syndrome,
which to me was like a jumble of nonsense sounds when.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
He said that, well, that's the doctor meeting that nobody
wants to have. And also how brave of Amanda to
write about this and share it on the podcast. But
what is beck with Weedaman syndrome?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So Amanda said that b to BUS is a genetic
disorder where hearts of your body grow faster or bigger
than is typical. It's very rare, and it actually took
a month for her doctor to confirm that her son
did in fact have b TOWS and during that time,
like you can imagine all the googling she was doing.
And that's where I wanted to start my conversation with Amanda,
(03:18):
reflecting on that moment of uncertainty right after her son's diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Even before my pregnancy was complex, it was like a
very trying experience for me. You have to like sacrifice
a lot and endure a lot during pregnancy, and I
found myself thinking.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
About what my child was going to be like. And so.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
When I got this possible diagnosis for my son, I
immediately googled it as well, and I found that like
the prospect of my son having a genetic condition potentially
having like a catastrophic complication where I needed to make
decisions about my pregnancy and I needed to start to
(03:59):
imagine him differently, imagine myself differently, imagine my role as
a parent differently.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It so.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Limited my imagination around what my son was going to
be like and what our life was going to be like.
And the first way I did that was just like
showing me pictures of kids who have BWS. When you
meet them in person, they're like human beings and their
kids and.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
They're beautiful and really cute.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And when you meet them online, it's like pictures that
have been taken from medical journals. So the kid is
sort of like in this like very medicalized environment, hooked
up to like wires and stuff. My son was born
with a very large tongue, so you would see kids
with their tongue just like stuck out as far as
they could make it stick out for the doctor to
(04:46):
take a photo, like their.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
Eyes blacked out.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And then photos from tabloid reporting. I found a lot
of photos from the Daily Mail, and so I was
like absorbing all of this new like imagine nation fodder
from the Internet that was from the medical world. Or
it was from the tabloid world, or it was from Reddit,
where they were just like teenagers speculating about bws and
(05:14):
like seeing pictures of babies with bws and giving their
thoughts about whether they thought they should be born. And
it was only like after my son was born and
I met him as like a person, as opposed to
this idea that was inside of me, that I realized
I had just like bathed my brain and all of
these distortions and lies about what he would be like
(05:38):
and what our life would be like. And that was
really when I started to think about just how influential
and damaging that experience.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Had been for me.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
You know, it's almost like the Internet immediately turns into
a Ripley's believe it or not when you go looking
for something, and it's never the sort of tempered, middle
of the road version of the thing that you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
And I think, you know, like the first time I
googled bws and I found an article in the Daily Mail,
I was like, well, my child is going to have
something so rare and alarming to other people that you
could write a newspaper article about it, And that I
think really affected how I started to think about it.
(06:24):
But then I realized later as I was like fact
checking and researching the book, that they do like publish
this article like every year about a different kid who
has BWS. So once you see all of them, there's
like fifteen or twenty articles, and you're like, oh, well,
it's actually, in fact, there are so many children in
the world that it's not quite so odd. And once
I got an actual diagnosis for my son before he
(06:46):
was born, I was able to join like Facebook groups
for people who have BWS and their families, and there
are like thousands of people in these groups, and so
eventually I was able to navigate to a part of
the internet that was comforting and helpful and helped me
(07:07):
realize there are many children.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
Like my son. I was not alone. There's so much
support there, and.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
There's such a diversity of people who are in these groups,
which made me feel like it alleviated some of the
guilt I had about feeling like I had done something
by not eating the right leafy green, or by drinking
a glass of wine, or by having a tablet of
an anti anxiety medication, that I had caused this somehow
(07:35):
by just the kind of person I am, but at
first it was a really horrifying experience to google it.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
But it is interesting that the thing that could make
you so miserable is also the thing that provided you
a safe harbor. Social media has that sort of double
edged nature.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think if you're someone who's dealing
with something that is rare, or at least like feels
rare in your community, the internet can be such a lifeline.
But it's also most helpful as something that is like
a supplement to my real human life. And when I
was pregnant, my son didn't present as a human yet.
(08:15):
It was as if I was experiencing him only through
the Internet, which is a terrifying way to experience another person,
especially someone who's going to be like so important to
you and who you are, You're the most important person
to them when they're born. And so I ultimately felt
like sad that my first encounter or like perceived encounter
(08:36):
with him was this of like fear and judgment, and
so it took me a while to sort of like
untangle myself from those feelings.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
What are some of the other ways that you felt
pregnancy technology was priming you to see surveillance as something normal,
and what do you think are the consequences of that?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, I mean I think The first real pregnancy tech
that I was spending time with was Flow, my period tracker,
which when I was using it as a.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
Period tracker, I loved it.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
It was such a great app I'm just such a
forgetful person that, like I would just have no idea
when my period was coming, and so having this alert
in my phone that was like just so you know,
if you feel uncomfortable and sad and angry in the
next day, maybe it's because of this. But then as
I started to think about getting pregnant, I realized that
(09:36):
it was also telling me when it thought that I
was at my most fertile, and so it became this
kind of like biological clock very quickly for me, something
that I have always thought of as like this sexist
and corny idea that there's like this ticking clock in
the back of women's minds, but it really it made
(09:58):
it real for me. It's like here, it is in
your hand. And then I used it to get pregnant,
and I was like very lucky and that I got
pregnant immediately, So I was like, wow, I think really works.
You know, I've been avoiding pregnancy all my life, and
I tried a couple of times and the app told
me like just what.
Speaker 5 (10:16):
To do and it was right.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
So I think at that point I had conferred this
power onto the app that maybe I wasn't realizing. And
then when I was pregnant, I realized that this app
that I had been using once a month, I was
now opening ten times a day. And it wasn't because
there was any new information in there necessarily, it was
(10:39):
because my mind had started to associate it with my
future baby, and so I was like thinking about that
all the time. I wasn't telling all of my family
members or friends or colleagues about it yet because it
was so early, And so it became this like outlet
for me to have this perosocial relationship with a fetus.
(11:03):
And it showed me this like floating peachy cgi representation
of what the baby looked like at that particular time.
And it was also like anthropomorphizing the embryo and the
fetus in this way that's like, this is how many
brain neurons or whatever your baby is accumulating by the hour,
(11:26):
Like it's getting so smart. Your baby's getting so smart
and it was like nine weeks gestation or whatever.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Did you feel as though you were interfacing with a
medical product when you were using Flow or were you
aware of the fact that it was basically a way
to capture your data and keep you on an app.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I mean, I don't think I thought of it as
either of those. I think if you had asked me,
journalist me, what are you doing, I would have said, Oh,
I'm interfacing with this app that is taking all of
this personal data from me and is kat asking me
to like upgrade the service or whatever like every day.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
But if you ask the me that exists beneath.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Rational me, the feeling me, it would have been like, oh,
this is the time that I'm spending with my baby.
I'm like opening it, seeing what it looks like, looking
as it transforms. But I think what I didn't realize
at first was I was absorbing what the app thought
was normal, what a normal mother does, what a normal
(12:35):
baby looks like. And at a certain point, once the
fetus gets aged enough, it has a face and it's
always kind of like peacefully smiling in there. And it
wasn't until I had this abnormal ultrasound that was the
first time really that I realized on an emotional level
that the picture in flow was not a picture of
(12:56):
my baby, and it was not actually a representation of
what my baby's face looked like.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
And that made me feel betrayed.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Which sounds nuts, But I had spent the first part
of my pregnancy relating to this thing, and now I
realized that it's not really showing me anything, So I
don't know anything.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Part of what I think you're talking about is this
instinct that we have to like offload our meaning making
onto apps, right that, like, I'm going to make meaning
of my life by creating data of myself.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yeah, I mean I think for me, I don't know
that the app was helping me, but it got me
used to this idea of like tracking myself and my baby,
even though there was no like achievement that I really
needed to make. But there a bunch of pregnancy apps
like create things that they hope that you achieve, like
(13:50):
that you'll be doing pelvic floor exercises every day, or
that you'll get your like thirty minutes of exercise, and
like yoga doesn't count.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
For me.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It was more just like this drum beat of getting
the information and giving the information back. That felt like
something I was compelled to do. You know, women are
used to that, just the sense of being surveilled by
who knows what and participating in it. But I think
this specifically trains parents to start being the surveilling force
(14:23):
of their kid, and once their baby is born, to
consider all of these products that tell you if your
baby is sleeping normally, if your baby is developing normally,
if they're growing normally, or whatever, when it's just not
necessary in most cases. And also this idea of normalcy,
(14:45):
it's not a real thing. There's no real normal, average person.
That's like an idea that we have. But for me,
as the parent of a kid who ended up having
a disability, I think it can be destructive because there's
a suggestion beneath all of it that what we really
all want is like a normal kid. And I found later,
(15:08):
like after my kid was born, that wasn't really what
I wanted, but it's what I felt that I wanted.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
A long time ago, I reported on a story about
this woman called Gillian Bruckell who was served adoption ads
after her still birth, and one of the kind of
conclusions that she came to was the idea that, like Facebook,
ads were not programmed to understand any alternative for a childbirth.
(15:36):
You know, there are no variables that are engineered into
the way we are marketed to as expected mothers.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I'm always, I feel like in my work, like struggling
to understand whether technology if it knows so much about us,
or if it really knows nothing. It's just so easy
to like project ourselves onto this stuff. But I yeah,
I found with Flow it made a lot of ass
about how a person felt about their pregnancy, whether it
(16:05):
was something that they wanted to continue or not. There
was a point in my pregnancy where I got an
ultrasound from a doctor who is an expert in fetal brains,
and she told me that she saw something.
Speaker 5 (16:19):
Unusual in my fetus's brain, but that I would.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Need to get an MRI in order to confirm the results.
And I needed to wait a week to get that MRI.
And once I got THERI, the MRI doctor said the
brain was perfectly normal looking. But for that week, I
was like, this was a wanted pregnancy, But now I
have to prepare for the possibility that I am carrying
(16:46):
a baby who's not going to survive or who I
would need to consider the possibility of having an abortion.
And meanwhile I was opening Flow and it was like,
your baby's almost here, Like your baby is almost gonna
be bought, Like your baby is crying in the womb,
just like it's gonna cry on the outside.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And I was so.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Shaken and offended that this the app was like assuming
all of these things that I felt like, at least
for that week, we're no longer things that I could assume.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
But yeah, it really it knew my do date and
that was it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
After the break, the blurry line between pregnancy tech and
eugenics stayed with us. One of the most surprising things
(17:57):
about the book to me was the kind of rabbit
hole you go down, connecting eugenics in Silicon Valley to
genetic screening startups and then how it all shockingly ties
into feminist theory. So how did you end up making
these connections and what were some of your big takeaways
from this section.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Of the book.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
I mean, I think at first I was using Flow
and I was just trying to understand, like who started
tracking periods, Like how were people tracking periods before apps?
Before feminist books in the nineteen seventies, and there's a
bunch of different theories about what the origins are.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
Like there are people who believe that they are.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Like notches on an ancient whalebone that represent like a
women's cycle. But like what I came to understand was,
for most of human history, like women's cycles were so
irregular that it wouldn't have made sense to track a
period just because the level of nutrition or whatever, like
food security of human beings was not what it is today.
(19:00):
But then I found this woman, Marie Stops, who was
like an early proponent of tracking women's cycles, and she
was doing it in this proto feminist way in the
early nineteen hundreds. There was a lot of like fascination
at this time about menstrual cycles, whether they meant that
like women shouldn't be able to work because they were
(19:21):
like laid out for like several days a month or whatever.
And she started tracking her cycle on paper and then
tracking basically like how horny she was at various parts
in the cycle to prove that like this horniness that
she was experiencing was natural, it was normal, and that
(19:43):
it didn't have anything to do with her husband. And
it really reminded me of flow because there were so
many things that she was charting that I could chart
in my flow app And then I found out that
she was like a huge proponent of eugenics, which at
the time was very popular as it is now again today,
I think, but there was a way in which her
(20:04):
eugenics intersected with this data tracking that she was doing,
where she was establishing what was normal in a reproductive sense,
and she was also arguing that people who fall outside
of the bounds of normal, which for her was Northern European, white,
heterosexual whatever.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
Should not be allowed to reproduce.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
And so I became interested in like where eugenics was
like sort of coursing through our modern technologies too. And
I do think there's this drumbeat of normal that they
try to establish often that carries on some of the
ideologies of that movement. But as I went on writing
(20:51):
the book, I found many more Silicon Valley startups that
are just self consciously eugenic, Like they wouldn't say that
their eugenics, but they are trying to improve the stock
of human babies.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
I have a kid who has an.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Overgrowth disorder, which means that he is a higher risk
of having pediatric cancer than most kids. And so when
I read a lot of the advertisements for these testing companies,
these embryo testing companies, I find that, like the first
thing they often say is pediatric cancer. They're basically like
(21:33):
claiming they can like cure cancer by weeding it out genetically.
And then after that they're introducing other stuff like maybe
someday we could have like an IQ score, or you
could optimize for a baby who was tall and who
had great coordination and maybe they'd be like very good
at playing sports or whatever. But I always found that
(21:53):
it was sort of like taken as non controversial that
you would want to like eradicates associated with pediatric cancer,
which I find interesting because like, that's that's my son, right,
and I certainly don't want to eliminate him, and I
think he has a life worth living.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
And all of these things, I think, you know, have been.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Coming out and are endorsed by tech political leaders who
are at the same time slashing research for pediatric cancer
or like getting rid of welfare.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
And I see all.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
The time like comments under these companies ads that are
like this is really going to reduce the amount of
money that we have to pay for healthcare. And so
when I was first starting to look at this stuff,
I was like, oh, like deep within this stuff, there's
sort of like hints of eugenics. And then at the
end of writing the book, you know, now that it's
twenty twenty five, it's it's not a hint anymore.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Do you have advice for parents or people who are
planning on becoming parents and are overwhelmed with figuring out
what role technology should play in parenting? Do you have
any sensible takeaways?
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah, I mean I think the most sensible advice that
I give people is like, try not to buy anything
before your kid is born.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Which defies conventional wisdom.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I know, once the algorithms like figure out you're pregnant,
they're going to be trying to sell you all of
this stuff.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
And it's like a.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Five hundred dollars video monitor that like uploads a three
D representation of your child to the cloud that's like
watched to see if they are like breathing normally or whatever.
I was so stressed during pregnancy, and I felt so
unprepared that I it's not that I bought everything, but
I bought stuff that I didn't end up needing and
(23:47):
now I have like a fifteen dollars audio monitor, which
would have been perfectly acceptable with a newborn as well.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
And was acceptable for many decades.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was helpful to me to
like see the way that these audio monitors were advertised
when they first came out, like in the nineteen twenties.
There's so much fear mongering in the ads, and it's like,
you need this two way radio to hear if somebody
is going to enter your home and snatch your baby away.
(24:18):
And they call them like the radio nurse or whatever,
and their estyle is like so much more reliable than
a real baby nurse because it's not a person you
could steal a baby. And so to me, like just
seeing the stoking of the fear like transforms through the
generations where now it's like your baby may stop breathing
in the night and never breathe again, and that's true,
(24:40):
like that could happen, But none of these devices are
FDA approved for preventing SIDS.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
What is the craziest thing related to parenting or motherhood
that you have seen online?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
There's this genre of parenting video that's like a video
of the person's child making all of their food in
a tiny kitchen themselves. But it's because the parent is
like such a good parent that they've already trained their
two year old to like empty the dishwasher and like
boil water or whatever, like make pasta, like put their
(25:18):
cereal in a bowl from the cereal dispenser, and they're
like such a good parent that their child is this
like beautiful miniature kitchen or whatever. And then the comments
on it are like finding fault with the best parent ever,
and like that.
Speaker 5 (25:31):
Apple slice is too big.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, cereal isn't real food, Like have your child prepare
real food for themselves.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
I mean, I.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Think there's so much content.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
You know, I have toddlers.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Now I have like two year old and a four
year old, and so I'm aware of a bunch of
content around lunch packing or whatever. And it's styled as
like advice, Like I know, you're so out of ideas
of like what to pack for lunch here like all
of these ideas about what to put in the bento box.
And like I started out being like I don't think
I should know what somebody else feeds their child. Now
(26:06):
my kids are in public school, I'm like I don't
want to know what they eat, Like I don't want
to know what they're being fed at school. My mind
is like blissfully free of this information, and it's so great,
and I feel like there are all of these accounts
that like exist to like try to make you do
work that's like not actually necessary, and like having my
(26:30):
kids like eat school lunch just basically the one way
I'm able to access this ideal society where like we
actually share things and like we eat the same thing
instead of sharing advice on how you can make the
same fancy omelet that.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
I've paid for my kid.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I think just this idea of like trading actual support
with advice is like such a bad trade off.
Speaker 5 (26:53):
It's such an awful trade off.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Thanks so much for joining me, Amanda.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Thank you so much for having me for tech stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
I'm Kara Price Namas Valoshian.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
This episode was.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill. It
was executive produced by me Ozwalashan, Julia Nutter, and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech when Karen
I will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
Welcome to tex Stuff. I'm as Volocian here with Cara Prices.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Has social media ever made you feel superstitious or paranoid?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I mean I've dipped my toe into the world of
social media Instagram. I'm getting push notifications about being bold
and about being depressed. I know I'm bold, am I
depressed too? That makes me feel a bit paranoid that
the algorithm may know more about me than I know
about myself.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I similarly get fed things that I've searched for that
I don't want to know about myself. Why do you ask, Well,
I feel like this is kind of a universal state.
This tech induce paranoia, like most people can relate to it.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Nobody would be like, yeah, you know, I just think
social media is just such a fun, clear place to
rest my head. And I actually spoke about this feeling
with Amanda Hess, who is a writer at large for
The New York Times covering technology and internet culture.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
She actually she wrote a fascinating column in the last
couple of weeks actually about somebody who live streamed their
birth on Twitch. So I'm very interested in her in
her take in general. In the story, she finds.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
She's super smart, and I would definitely check out her
book if you haven't checked it out. It's called Second Life,
Having a Child in the Digital Age. And she said
that even though she's normally really rational, getting pregnant changed
her relationship to technology and kind of fed into a
lot of superstitious feelings that I think most women feel
(01:39):
went pregnant.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Pregnancy is such a time of imagination and conjecture, and
I had never been pregnant before. I didn't have many
close friends who had undergone pregnancy, and so I was
just turning to the Internet for everything, Like I ate
a piece of turkey that tasted bad, Like what's going
(02:04):
to happen? Like do I need to make myself throw up?
Do I need to go to the hospital? I was
like constantly googling stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
And Amanda's superstitions were complicated by the fact that her
pregnancy actually became complex.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
When I was about seven months pregnant, I had a
routine ultrasound where my doctor, as he put it, saw
something he didn't like, and at first my doctors didn't
know what it was, but he suggested that he thought
it might be a genetic syndrome called beck with Weedaman syndrome,
which to me was like a jumble of nonsense sounds when.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
He said that, well, that's the doctor meeting that nobody
wants to have. And also how brave of Amanda to
write about this and share it on the podcast. But
what is beck with Weedaman syndrome?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So Amanda said that b to BUS is a genetic
disorder where hearts of your body grow faster or bigger
than is typical. It's very rare, and it actually took
a month for her doctor to confirm that her son
did in fact have b TOWS and during that time,
like you can imagine all the googling she was doing.
And that's where I wanted to start my conversation with Amanda,
(03:18):
reflecting on that moment of uncertainty right after her son's diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Even before my pregnancy was complex, it was like a
very trying experience for me. You have to like sacrifice
a lot and endure a lot during pregnancy, and I
found myself thinking.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
About what my child was going to be like. And so.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
When I got this possible diagnosis for my son, I
immediately googled it as well, and I found that like
the prospect of my son having a genetic condition potentially
having like a catastrophic complication where I needed to make
decisions about my pregnancy and I needed to start to
(03:59):
imagine him differently, imagine myself differently, imagine my role as
a parent differently.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It so.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Limited my imagination around what my son was going to
be like and what our life was going to be like.
And the first way I did that was just like
showing me pictures of kids who have BWS. When you
meet them in person, they're like human beings and their
kids and.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
They're beautiful and really cute.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And when you meet them online, it's like pictures that
have been taken from medical journals. So the kid is
sort of like in this like very medicalized environment, hooked
up to like wires and stuff. My son was born
with a very large tongue, so you would see kids
with their tongue just like stuck out as far as
they could make it stick out for the doctor to
(04:46):
take a photo, like their.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
Eyes blacked out.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And then photos from tabloid reporting. I found a lot
of photos from the Daily Mail, and so I was
like absorbing all of this new like imagine nation fodder
from the Internet that was from the medical world. Or
it was from the tabloid world, or it was from Reddit,
where they were just like teenagers speculating about bws and
(05:14):
like seeing pictures of babies with bws and giving their
thoughts about whether they thought they should be born. And
it was only like after my son was born and
I met him as like a person, as opposed to
this idea that was inside of me, that I realized
I had just like bathed my brain and all of
these distortions and lies about what he would be like
(05:38):
and what our life would be like. And that was
really when I started to think about just how influential
and damaging that experience.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Had been for me.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
You know, it's almost like the Internet immediately turns into
a Ripley's believe it or not when you go looking
for something, and it's never the sort of tempered, middle
of the road version of the thing that you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
And I think, you know, like the first time I
googled bws and I found an article in the Daily Mail,
I was like, well, my child is going to have
something so rare and alarming to other people that you
could write a newspaper article about it, And that I
think really affected how I started to think about it.
(06:24):
But then I realized later as I was like fact
checking and researching the book, that they do like publish
this article like every year about a different kid who
has BWS. So once you see all of them, there's
like fifteen or twenty articles, and you're like, oh, well,
it's actually, in fact, there are so many children in
the world that it's not quite so odd. And once
I got an actual diagnosis for my son before he
(06:46):
was born, I was able to join like Facebook groups
for people who have BWS and their families, and there
are like thousands of people in these groups, and so
eventually I was able to navigate to a part of
the internet that was comforting and helpful and helped me
(07:07):
realize there are many children.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
Like my son. I was not alone. There's so much
support there, and.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
There's such a diversity of people who are in these groups,
which made me feel like it alleviated some of the
guilt I had about feeling like I had done something
by not eating the right leafy green, or by drinking
a glass of wine, or by having a tablet of
an anti anxiety medication, that I had caused this somehow
(07:35):
by just the kind of person I am, but at
first it was a really horrifying experience to google it.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
But it is interesting that the thing that could make
you so miserable is also the thing that provided you
a safe harbor. Social media has that sort of double
edged nature.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think if you're someone who's dealing
with something that is rare, or at least like feels
rare in your community, the internet can be such a lifeline.
But it's also most helpful as something that is like
a supplement to my real human life. And when I
was pregnant, my son didn't present as a human yet.
(08:15):
It was as if I was experiencing him only through
the Internet, which is a terrifying way to experience another person,
especially someone who's going to be like so important to
you and who you are, You're the most important person
to them when they're born. And so I ultimately felt
like sad that my first encounter or like perceived encounter
(08:36):
with him was this of like fear and judgment, and
so it took me a while to sort of like
untangle myself from those feelings.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
What are some of the other ways that you felt
pregnancy technology was priming you to see surveillance as something normal,
and what do you think are the consequences of that?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, I mean I think The first real pregnancy tech
that I was spending time with was Flow, my period tracker,
which when I was using it as a.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
Period tracker, I loved it.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
It was such a great app I'm just such a
forgetful person that, like I would just have no idea
when my period was coming, and so having this alert
in my phone that was like just so you know,
if you feel uncomfortable and sad and angry in the
next day, maybe it's because of this. But then as
I started to think about getting pregnant, I realized that
(09:36):
it was also telling me when it thought that I
was at my most fertile, and so it became this
kind of like biological clock very quickly for me, something
that I have always thought of as like this sexist
and corny idea that there's like this ticking clock in
the back of women's minds, but it really it made
(09:58):
it real for me. It's like here, it is in
your hand. And then I used it to get pregnant,
and I was like very lucky and that I got
pregnant immediately, So I was like, wow, I think really works.
You know, I've been avoiding pregnancy all my life, and
I tried a couple of times and the app told
me like just what.
Speaker 5 (10:16):
To do and it was right.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
So I think at that point I had conferred this
power onto the app that maybe I wasn't realizing. And
then when I was pregnant, I realized that this app
that I had been using once a month, I was
now opening ten times a day. And it wasn't because
there was any new information in there necessarily, it was
(10:39):
because my mind had started to associate it with my
future baby, and so I was like thinking about that
all the time. I wasn't telling all of my family
members or friends or colleagues about it yet because it
was so early, And so it became this like outlet
for me to have this perosocial relationship with a fetus.
(11:03):
And it showed me this like floating peachy cgi representation
of what the baby looked like at that particular time.
And it was also like anthropomorphizing the embryo and the
fetus in this way that's like, this is how many
brain neurons or whatever your baby is accumulating by the hour,
(11:26):
Like it's getting so smart. Your baby's getting so smart
and it was like nine weeks gestation or whatever.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Did you feel as though you were interfacing with a
medical product when you were using Flow or were you
aware of the fact that it was basically a way
to capture your data and keep you on an app.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I mean, I don't think I thought of it as
either of those. I think if you had asked me,
journalist me, what are you doing, I would have said, Oh,
I'm interfacing with this app that is taking all of
this personal data from me and is kat asking me
to like upgrade the service or whatever like every day.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
But if you ask the me that exists beneath.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Rational me, the feeling me, it would have been like, oh,
this is the time that I'm spending with my baby.
I'm like opening it, seeing what it looks like, looking
as it transforms. But I think what I didn't realize
at first was I was absorbing what the app thought
was normal, what a normal mother does, what a normal
(12:35):
baby looks like. And at a certain point, once the
fetus gets aged enough, it has a face and it's
always kind of like peacefully smiling in there. And it
wasn't until I had this abnormal ultrasound that was the
first time really that I realized on an emotional level
that the picture in flow was not a picture of
(12:56):
my baby, and it was not actually a representation of
what my baby's face looked like.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
And that made me feel betrayed.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Which sounds nuts, But I had spent the first part
of my pregnancy relating to this thing, and now I
realized that it's not really showing me anything, So I
don't know anything.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Part of what I think you're talking about is this
instinct that we have to like offload our meaning making
onto apps, right that, like, I'm going to make meaning
of my life by creating data of myself.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yeah, I mean I think for me, I don't know
that the app was helping me, but it got me
used to this idea of like tracking myself and my baby,
even though there was no like achievement that I really
needed to make. But there a bunch of pregnancy apps
like create things that they hope that you achieve, like
(13:50):
that you'll be doing pelvic floor exercises every day, or
that you'll get your like thirty minutes of exercise, and
like yoga doesn't count.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
For me.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It was more just like this drum beat of getting
the information and giving the information back. That felt like
something I was compelled to do. You know, women are
used to that, just the sense of being surveilled by
who knows what and participating in it. But I think
this specifically trains parents to start being the surveilling force
(14:23):
of their kid, and once their baby is born, to
consider all of these products that tell you if your
baby is sleeping normally, if your baby is developing normally,
if they're growing normally, or whatever, when it's just not
necessary in most cases. And also this idea of normalcy,
(14:45):
it's not a real thing. There's no real normal, average person.
That's like an idea that we have. But for me,
as the parent of a kid who ended up having
a disability, I think it can be destructive because there's
a suggestion beneath all of it that what we really
all want is like a normal kid. And I found later,
(15:08):
like after my kid was born, that wasn't really what
I wanted, but it's what I felt that I wanted.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
A long time ago, I reported on a story about
this woman called Gillian Bruckell who was served adoption ads
after her still birth, and one of the kind of
conclusions that she came to was the idea that, like Facebook,
ads were not programmed to understand any alternative for a childbirth.
(15:36):
You know, there are no variables that are engineered into
the way we are marketed to as expected mothers.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I'm always, I feel like in my work, like struggling
to understand whether technology if it knows so much about us,
or if it really knows nothing. It's just so easy
to like project ourselves onto this stuff. But I yeah,
I found with Flow it made a lot of ass
about how a person felt about their pregnancy, whether it
(16:05):
was something that they wanted to continue or not. There
was a point in my pregnancy where I got an
ultrasound from a doctor who is an expert in fetal brains,
and she told me that she saw something.
Speaker 5 (16:19):
Unusual in my fetus's brain, but that I would.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Need to get an MRI in order to confirm the results.
And I needed to wait a week to get that MRI.
And once I got THERI, the MRI doctor said the
brain was perfectly normal looking. But for that week, I
was like, this was a wanted pregnancy, But now I
have to prepare for the possibility that I am carrying
(16:46):
a baby who's not going to survive or who I
would need to consider the possibility of having an abortion.
And meanwhile I was opening Flow and it was like,
your baby's almost here, Like your baby is almost gonna
be bought, Like your baby is crying in the womb,
just like it's gonna cry on the outside.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And I was so.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Shaken and offended that this the app was like assuming
all of these things that I felt like, at least
for that week, we're no longer things that I could assume.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
But yeah, it really it knew my do date and
that was it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
After the break, the blurry line between pregnancy tech and
eugenics stayed with us. One of the most surprising things
(17:57):
about the book to me was the kind of rabbit
hole you go down, connecting eugenics in Silicon Valley to
genetic screening startups and then how it all shockingly ties
into feminist theory. So how did you end up making
these connections and what were some of your big takeaways
from this section.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Of the book.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
I mean, I think at first I was using Flow
and I was just trying to understand, like who started
tracking periods, Like how were people tracking periods before apps?
Before feminist books in the nineteen seventies, and there's a
bunch of different theories about what the origins are.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
Like there are people who believe that they are.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Like notches on an ancient whalebone that represent like a
women's cycle. But like what I came to understand was,
for most of human history, like women's cycles were so
irregular that it wouldn't have made sense to track a
period just because the level of nutrition or whatever, like
food security of human beings was not what it is today.
(19:00):
But then I found this woman, Marie Stops, who was
like an early proponent of tracking women's cycles, and she
was doing it in this proto feminist way in the
early nineteen hundreds. There was a lot of like fascination
at this time about menstrual cycles, whether they meant that
like women shouldn't be able to work because they were
(19:21):
like laid out for like several days a month or whatever.
And she started tracking her cycle on paper and then
tracking basically like how horny she was at various parts
in the cycle to prove that like this horniness that
she was experiencing was natural, it was normal, and that
(19:43):
it didn't have anything to do with her husband. And
it really reminded me of flow because there were so
many things that she was charting that I could chart
in my flow app And then I found out that
she was like a huge proponent of eugenics, which at
the time was very popular as it is now again today,
I think, but there was a way in which her
(20:04):
eugenics intersected with this data tracking that she was doing,
where she was establishing what was normal in a reproductive sense,
and she was also arguing that people who fall outside
of the bounds of normal, which for her was Northern European, white,
heterosexual whatever.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
Should not be allowed to reproduce.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
And so I became interested in like where eugenics was
like sort of coursing through our modern technologies too. And
I do think there's this drumbeat of normal that they
try to establish often that carries on some of the
ideologies of that movement. But as I went on writing
(20:51):
the book, I found many more Silicon Valley startups that
are just self consciously eugenic, Like they wouldn't say that
their eugenics, but they are trying to improve the stock
of human babies.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
I have a kid who has an.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Overgrowth disorder, which means that he is a higher risk
of having pediatric cancer than most kids. And so when
I read a lot of the advertisements for these testing companies,
these embryo testing companies, I find that, like the first
thing they often say is pediatric cancer. They're basically like
(21:33):
claiming they can like cure cancer by weeding it out genetically.
And then after that they're introducing other stuff like maybe
someday we could have like an IQ score, or you
could optimize for a baby who was tall and who
had great coordination and maybe they'd be like very good
at playing sports or whatever. But I always found that
(21:53):
it was sort of like taken as non controversial that
you would want to like eradicates associated with pediatric cancer,
which I find interesting because like, that's that's my son, right,
and I certainly don't want to eliminate him, and I
think he has a life worth living.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
And all of these things, I think, you know, have been.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Coming out and are endorsed by tech political leaders who
are at the same time slashing research for pediatric cancer
or like getting rid of welfare.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
And I see all.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
The time like comments under these companies ads that are
like this is really going to reduce the amount of
money that we have to pay for healthcare. And so
when I was first starting to look at this stuff,
I was like, oh, like deep within this stuff, there's
sort of like hints of eugenics. And then at the
end of writing the book, you know, now that it's
twenty twenty five, it's it's not a hint anymore.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Do you have advice for parents or people who are
planning on becoming parents and are overwhelmed with figuring out
what role technology should play in parenting? Do you have
any sensible takeaways?
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah, I mean I think the most sensible advice that
I give people is like, try not to buy anything
before your kid is born.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Which defies conventional wisdom.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I know, once the algorithms like figure out you're pregnant,
they're going to be trying to sell you all of
this stuff.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
And it's like a.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Five hundred dollars video monitor that like uploads a three
D representation of your child to the cloud that's like
watched to see if they are like breathing normally or whatever.
I was so stressed during pregnancy, and I felt so
unprepared that I it's not that I bought everything, but
I bought stuff that I didn't end up needing and
(23:47):
now I have like a fifteen dollars audio monitor, which
would have been perfectly acceptable with a newborn as well.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
And was acceptable for many decades.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was helpful to me to
like see the way that these audio monitors were advertised
when they first came out, like in the nineteen twenties.
There's so much fear mongering in the ads, and it's like,
you need this two way radio to hear if somebody
is going to enter your home and snatch your baby away.
(24:18):
And they call them like the radio nurse or whatever,
and their estyle is like so much more reliable than
a real baby nurse because it's not a person you
could steal a baby. And so to me, like just
seeing the stoking of the fear like transforms through the
generations where now it's like your baby may stop breathing
in the night and never breathe again, and that's true,
(24:40):
like that could happen, But none of these devices are
FDA approved for preventing SIDS.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
What is the craziest thing related to parenting or motherhood
that you have seen online?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
There's this genre of parenting video that's like a video
of the person's child making all of their food in
a tiny kitchen themselves. But it's because the parent is
like such a good parent that they've already trained their
two year old to like empty the dishwasher and like
boil water or whatever, like make pasta, like put their
(25:18):
cereal in a bowl from the cereal dispenser, and they're
like such a good parent that their child is this
like beautiful miniature kitchen or whatever. And then the comments
on it are like finding fault with the best parent ever,
and like that.
Speaker 5 (25:31):
Apple slice is too big.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, cereal isn't real food, Like have your child prepare
real food for themselves.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
I mean, I.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Think there's so much content.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
You know, I have toddlers.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Now I have like two year old and a four
year old, and so I'm aware of a bunch of
content around lunch packing or whatever. And it's styled as
like advice, Like I know, you're so out of ideas
of like what to pack for lunch here like all
of these ideas about what to put in the bento box.
And like I started out being like I don't think
I should know what somebody else feeds their child. Now
(26:06):
my kids are in public school, I'm like I don't
want to know what they eat, Like I don't want
to know what they're being fed at school. My mind
is like blissfully free of this information, and it's so great,
and I feel like there are all of these accounts
that like exist to like try to make you do
work that's like not actually necessary, and like having my
(26:30):
kids like eat school lunch just basically the one way
I'm able to access this ideal society where like we
actually share things and like we eat the same thing
instead of sharing advice on how you can make the
same fancy omelet that.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
I've paid for my kid.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I think just this idea of like trading actual support
with advice is like such a bad trade off.
Speaker 5 (26:53):
It's such an awful trade off.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Thanks so much for joining me, Amanda.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Thank you so much for having me for tech stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
I'm Kara Price Namas Valoshian.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
This episode was.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill. It
was executive produced by me Ozwalashan, Julia Nutter, and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech when Karen
I will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
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