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When she was seven months pregnant, Amanda Hess went to the doctor for a regular sonogram. And so, you know, I take my shirt off, I get slathered with the gel and stuff, and the technician does this ultrasound that I've had, you know, at this point many times during my pregnancy. But then it just doesn't stop. It was the summer of 2020, and COVID protocols meant that Amanda couldn't have anyone with her. She was alone.
She leaves to go get the doctor, but then she comes back alone and continues to capture images. And at a certain point, I could tell that something was wrong. The technician didn't say much, just that the baby was sticking his tongue out. And at that moment, like the thing I remember most, the feeling I remember most was just like desperately, desperately wanting my phone.
It wasn't like, I wish my husband was here. It was like, I wish that my phone was not six feet away. I wish it was in my hand so that while she was doing this, I could Google stuck out tongue ultrasound seven months, whatever, and just assure myself that whatever it was, was going to be okay.
Amanda is a critic for the New York Times who writes a lot about culture. She's just written a book about her pregnancy and her son's early years and that longing for technology to comfort her. It's called Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. You write that if I had the phone, I could hold it close to the exam table and Google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers. Had you ever thought about that?
Had you already had that relationship with your phone, do you think? Like, you write that your phone probably knew you were pregnant before Mark did.
Yeah, I mean, I think before I was pregnant, I didn't think that I had that kind of relationship with my phone. I have been writing about internet culture for a really long time. And so I have this particularly ambivalent relationship with technology, I think, where it's my job to just immerse myself in something for a little while and then figure it out later.
write this story about it and put it down and never think about it again. And it was only in pregnancy where I was so shocked by the fact of being pregnant. Not that, I mean, I had been trying to get pregnant and I wanted to be pregnant, but then there was a human growing inside of me and that
Like I had no idea how to process that. I had never been pregnant before. I didn't have a lot of friends who had little kids. And so I found myself really relying on the internet just to like assure me that I was doing an okay job of being pregnant. And then so when this happened and I'm getting the sense that
that something has gone a little sideways. The message was to me, the internal message, like the conversation between me and technology was you didn't do a good job actually, you know, because something has happened that you and your pregnancy app and whatever have been working for several months to try to prevent.
Today on the show, a conversation about how technology invaded one of the most intimate experiences in human life. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.
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Once again, that's Udacity.com backslash TBD for 40% off and make sure you use promo code TBD. Amanda's story starts with an app called Flow. In 2018, she started using it to track her period. I found that it was actually really helpful for me, but it was something that I really only needed to engage with once or twice a month.
And if you're an app developer, you know, you don't want your users to engage with an app once or twice a month. But I found that once I was trying to get pregnant and then eventually when I was pregnant, that's when I really got sucked in to Flow.
when I advanced to what it calls pregnancy mode. And I just started checking it like 10 times a day. Flo, which ironically was made by men, would tell her to eat sunflower seeds or green vegetables to optimize nutrition in a particular week of pregnancy. But Amanda wasn't even turning to Flo for advice exactly. I think I was just reading it for this simulated back and forth.
that there was an entity that I was having a constant conversation with about my pregnancy because I was thinking about my pregnancy all of the time. And I think through that experience,
It really just sent me the message that, yes, this is normal. You should be thinking about your pregnancy all the time. And it really habituated me to this feeling of like an outside authority monitoring my body and my performance really in pregnancy. I think, you know, all it knew about me was my expected due date.
But it still felt like it knew all of these intimate facts about what was going on in my body and what was going on with my baby. And it presented an image like this cute CGI alien fetus that it put in my hand that really at a certain point, as ridiculous as this sounds, made me feel like I was looking at my baby.
Our mother's generation had, you know, what to expect when you're expecting even people who are a little bit older and I'm older than you are. Is there something more intimate about an app? Like, I'm wondering what makes the app so much more addictive than thumbing through a book? Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I had pregnancy books too. I think the main difference for me was I wasn't carrying them all around with me. I wasn't taking them...
to the gym or into the office or whatever. I wasn't taking them to the park, like as I was like trying to relax and just paging through them. And I think because my pregnancy app was always with me, whether I, you know, had set an intention to bring it or not, it really made it possible for me to be checking it all the time and also to just foster this
There's no exhaustive list of pregnancy apps. I used a different one from Amanda that compared the size of my fetus to a new fruit every week.
Then there are the newborn apps that allow you to track every feeding, movement, and dirty diaper. Not to mention the range of high-tech monitors to surveil your baby, plus the many, many, many chat rooms and Instagram influencers for every possible kind of parenting.
You are a very savvy internet user compared to most people. And you ran an experiment in the book where you kind of retrace your steps on the internet, trying to figure out how quickly the internet knew you were pregnant, how much of that was served to advertisers. Can you tell me a little bit about that realization and what you saw? I think I had this sense in my head that there's some person...
whose job it is to like press all these little buttons. There's like a little elf in there in all of these ad tech systems who's like, okay, so this person who owns this phone is pregnant. So I'm going to
press the pregnancy button and like switch the pregnancy switch. And it's just so much more fluid than that. And it's all just happening on this automatic level that I think I just didn't appreciate until I really saw how quickly I started getting Instagram ads. And at the same time, like,
Even though I was then targeted so specifically and intimately, I also, you know, came to understand just like how offensive that can be when you're pregnant and like it knows that you're pregnant, but that's all it knows. It doesn't know how you feel about your pregnancy. It doesn't know that you're worried, you know, very late in your pregnancy about losing it.
or whatever. And so it was in those moments that I really began to understand on a personal level, like, just how horrific that system can be. When we come back, from trad wives to medical moms, how pregnancy and parenthood is performed on the internet. If you're running a business, you know how important it is to stay connected to your customers. And having a flexible and efficient phone system is essential to success.
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Amanda's son was diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which is a rare overgrowth syndrome. It can lead to parts of a newborn, like a tongue or some organs, being larger than others.
The diagnosis allowed Amanda and her husband Mark to prepare in some ways for their child's birth, to find the right specialist, to have them on hand. And she found fellow BWS families on TikTok, which was comforting. But at the same time, they really came to represent this issue that I was grappling with myself and that I continue to grapple with, especially as I have just released a book called
That's largely about my experience with my son, which is like how much of his life and how much of his medical experiences belong to me as a story to tell and present. And there are medical mom accounts that I think take this to an extreme where
The child is like a star of the account. They're performing their illness in some way or performing their disability. This performance of medical need becomes important for the family to generate funds to pay for specialized medical equipment and stuff like that. And so it's this very...
queasy situation. And I really came to understand so many different perspectives on it. Like, I understand the disabled child who becomes the disabled adult who feels completely violated by having had their medical experiences exposed online. And I also understand the parent who feels
whose life has been unexpectedly changed to be, in some cases, exclusively about their child's medical care and who needs to make sense of their life and tell stories about their life. So I'm someone who makes sense of my life through writing, and I tell stories about myself in articles and books. And I'm so grateful for that, even though it has its own, I think, kind of ethical questions about
But so many people, I think the thing that they have access to to make meaning out of their lives now is social media. And that is, you know, to put it mildly, like an imperfect vehicle for doing that.
I'm thinking about a moment. You and I know each other, IRL. I'm thinking about a moment. You were probably nine months pregnant or close to it. And I handed off a box of onesies because I gave birth a few months before you did. And now, of course, I know what was going on in your brain and, you know, between you and Mark in that moment. And
I'm curious whether it was easier for you to talk about BWS on the internet to relative strangers or to friends or like, how did, how did that land for you? Yeah. I mean, I think I went through a period of not knowing what to say for so many reasons because, you know,
I had this cute, adorable, wonderful baby who was, you know, largely healthy. And so it wasn't something that I think was...
Completely overwhelming his experience of life. But also when I would bring him around, he would prompt sort of questions because he has he you know, he's since had a tongue reduction surgery, which has made his tongue smaller. But he was born with a very, very, very large tongue.
So I was just kind of trying to navigate this in-person information transfer where I was like, do I have to present some kind of affirmative defense of my son where I'm like, maybe you're noticing that he has a very large tongue, like this is why. Or do I, you know, not really have to say anything. And I think definitely.
Definitely, it became easier for me to start to articulate our experience online, especially in more sort of semi-private spaces. There are so many groups online dedicated to people with rare illnesses and their families. And I was able to find a few of those support groups online.
that were really helpful to be able to start. You know, I was posting images of my son that I wouldn't post like on the wide open internet of us, like having a good time in the children's hospital or whatever. I do feel like the fact of having spoken about this and revealed his diagnosis is like, it's a very selfish choice on my part. It's something that like,
I'm comfortable with that, but I don't think of it as something that I'm doing like to raise awareness or something like that. It's something that I did to better understand myself and to better understand myself as a parent. And I think through that understanding, I've become a better parent, but I've also exposed things about our family that are complicated.
There is the searching, the supporting, the kind of internet of research or maybe obsessive self-research. But then there's the internet of performing. And like the internet of performing motherhood is so broad and multifaceted. At this point, I would wager that everyone who listens to this conversation has seen Tradwife content before.
But there are all these different kinds of motherhood performed online. Which ones compelled you the most? I've come to be more interested in the trad wives than I think
It's because they present themselves as this throwback to an idealized time that probably never existed. But also they're such hyper-modern figures in that they perform this illusion where the mother can...
manage the household, but also bring in an income like at the exact same time. She can bring in the income by managing the household. She can consume constantly, like always show up in a different outfit, but also be like producing these like bespoke products.
consumption items for her own children. And I think in the wrapping up of all of those things into an illusion, I think she really speaks to the fact that women forget about having it all. That phrase makes no sense to me. We're just expected to do it all and to sort of like
work past any obstacles that are presented by a lack of social safety net or a lack of, you know, accommodations in work. And it's once I started to see them in that way that I really did see that they had some relationship to my life after all. You spend quite a bit of time in this book writing about...
the intertwining of eugenics and kind of the birth and pregnancy apparatus, both its history and its present, where, you know, there are a lot of prenatal tests one can do. I did IVF. I had a genetically screened embryo. And I
I wonder where you've landed in the Venn diagram of what is okay. Yeah. I mean, I think I had this sense before I wrote this book that eugenics was the forced sterilization of certain populations. And it is that and has been that. But there are so many other ways that eugenics works.
was practiced among its proponents. And one of those ways was in the encouragement of certain populations of people to procreate with one another in order to, you know, ensure that
an ideal child that can then better the human race or more specifically the white race through this perfection of human genetics. And I think we're seeing this
a privatized spin on that now where prenatal testing is advancing so rapidly that when I was starting to take my prenatal tests, there are tests that I didn't realize this at the time, but that my doctors had not been administering for very long, that my friends who had been pregnant five or 10 years ago had not taken. But to me, the thing that is most
The thing that worries me the most is not that these technologies exist or that they're being developed, but that they're being developed with a speed and an enthusiasm that far outstrips the tech industry's enthusiasm for making our built environment something that accommodates
disabled people, for making our society one that is inclusive of disabled people. And so, you know, it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that the point of many of these things is to eliminate disability. And I actually think that disability is good. I think it's, you know, it's an aspect of human difference, and I think difference is good. So
I have complex thoughts about it. Because also, you know, I took a prenatal test during my pregnancy that showed that my son had BWS. And because I took that test, I was able to have doctors waiting for him when I gave birth who could take him to the NICU and knew like the exact protocol that they needed to do to ensure that he was safe. So I don't know, the question is so complex. And I think
I'll be sort of changing my mind about it probably for the rest of my life. Amanda also spent time with the Black woman founder trying to use tech to push back against the bias embedded both in the medical system and the straight white assumptions in so much technology.
Kimberly Seals Allers created the Earth app after a terrible experience giving birth in New York City. Earth is a nonprofit app, and it's created for women of color to report their experiences during pregnancy in the medical system. It really, you know, it interests me in so many ways, but it...
really works as this counterbalance to the data collection of the medical system, which is often sorting us into categories, maybe even beyond the understanding of doctors and nurses, based on the kind of insurance we have, our race, our age, all of these factors that are determining
course of our care and the quality of our care. And that is, you know, particularly devastating for women of color who are pregnant and postpartum. So she created this app where women of color can report, they can input their own data about the hospitals, rating them on things, you know, ranging from the
just the general medical, the quality of the medical care they got to whether they were, you know, threatened with child removal. Jesus. Whether they, you know, felt that they were respected, that things were explained to them. And I came to see it also as this corrective to the mainstream community
the mainstream pregnancy app, which is so much about how the individual is responsible for priming their body, feeding themselves, moving in a particular way in order to ensure optimal outcomes for their pregnancy. And what Earth does is really clarify that all of these are systemic issues. They're not...
pregnancy bootstrapping issues. And so that's why I loved that app so much, of course, because it's not a for-profit, you know, menstruation app. Like it's, it's not as well known or popular, of course, as, as something like flow. You spend a
moment in the book exploring free birth, which on the one hand seems like the opposite of high tech, right? Women who are birthing alone, who are foregoing a lot of prenatal care, and yet also are often brought together via the internet. Why was free birth so compelling to you? You know, during my pregnancy, it was, it interested me because I,
had kind of tripped into this highly medicalized experience where all of a sudden after this abnormal ultrasound, I was getting ultrasounds every other day. I had a fetal MRI, which is something that I did not know existed where they're trying to look at my baby, like the fetus's brain through my body. And
And many of these experiences, even though by American standards, I had access to the best medical care possible, were like incredibly traumatic and confusing. And really, you know, they encouraged me to see my son in a certain way. And so I got this, I think,
in being able to put my headphones on and immerse myself in stories of women who were doing the exact opposite thing as I was, where they were in many cases...
rejecting prenatal care. They were giving birth alone, unassisted, with no obstetrician, no midwife, no doula or whatever. And so I think I became fascinated with them and the great risks that they were taking on because they represented risks that I would not have to face. I wouldn't have to worry about, you know,
having a stillbirth because I had given birth like in the woods somewhere and there was no one who could sort of like identify the signs and help me. So I was interested in where...
Like the experiences of having a highly medicalized pregnancy and having a very unmedicalized pregnancy aligned. And, you know, like so many things in birth, I saw them align with this undercurrent of eugenics where there is an idea ultimately that comes out where there's an acceptance among some free birth influencers of babies dying or
or of pregnancies ending naturally, quote unquote. And because it represents a kind of return to natural selection that has been artificially suppressed through prenatal and postnatal technologies. Even as it has been artificially suppressed wildly unequally. I mean, the year you and I gave birth...
two Black women died in New York City hospitals. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is like, I think also one of the things that's so damaging about the zeal for prenatal technologies among certain tech
oligarchs is that, you know, they talk about this idealized society that's going to be created and how it will be safer for children or whatever. There will be lower medical costs because there won't be so many kids with cancer. But even if that were true, like even if that became true, it would only be true for the smallest sliver of humanity. And I just think it's so disgusting.
In the space of thinking and writing about this book, you had a second child. And I wonder whether or how that informed your relationship to all of this technology and whether the tech was less seductive the second time around.
It definitely was. I mean, part of it is just that I had already bought everything that I needed and discovered that I didn't need most of it. There are so many parts of this book, The Tech, that we didn't even discuss because there's just so much. I know. But also, I think, you know, it's a common experience with a second child where just like I didn't have the bandwidth to pay so much attention to him.
So many of these technologies are about surveilling your child in a more intimate way. And I was just like, I just don't have time to sit around looking at a baby monitor because I have two kids now and it's very overwhelming. I do think a lot of these technologies that I write about in the book that are for surveilling babies and stuff like that are... There's a reason that...
these companies try to get you during pregnancy and it's because they want you to buy this stuff before there's a real human in your house who you like actually know what they need. I think I was so afraid to have a baby like in my home who I was supposed to keep alive that like, you know, on some level, I would have bought anything that promised to help me in that task. And it was only once he arrived that I realized that like,
the way to take care of a child is by like getting to know them and understanding their needs. Amanda Hess, thank you so much for coming on and for talking with me. Thank you so much. This was really fun. Amanda Hess is a critic at the New York Times and the author of the book Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. It's totally fascinating and you should check it out. All
All right. That is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shana Roth. Slate is run by Hilary Fry, and TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the best way to support us is to join our membership program, Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including this one, as well as access to exclusive bonus content, plus no paywall on the Slate site. Just
Just head over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up. All right, we'll be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening. This episode is brought to you by Discover.
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I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie.
In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?
The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.