The story of pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood follows a preordained, overarching plot—ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience—but its contours are as variable as the curves of a pregnant body or an individual digital footprint. As a longtime reporter on internet culture for The New York Times and elsewhere, Amanda Hess excels at connecting our private online encounters to wider cultural shifts. In her debut memoir of “having a child in the digital age,” she skewers the fluttering trends and quirks of the internet with the gentle ruthlessness of a lepidopterist, whether she’s describing the TikTok spectacle of tradwives in kitchens “as white as a near-death experience,” or escaping angry Reddit forums to ride the “pastel carousels” of Instagram. What quickly emerges from her tale is how atomized our digital lives have become, how splintered our shared reality. As a case in point, when Hess asks her husband what he thinks of their using the period-tracking app Flo to help them conceive, he reminds her, “You used the app.” Like “an appealingly dull video game,” Flo has sharpened Hess’s nascent desire for a baby into a plan, tipping her off to hormonal fluctuations and nudging her with reminders, until she unlocks the elusive pregnancy mode. “Obviously, I told the internet before I told my parents,” she says.
Pregnant and potentially pregnant people might feel hazily resistant to shoveling information about our bodies and sex lives into the maw of the internet, but at the same time, it strikes most of us as impossible, even absurd, to maintain the old boundaries of public versus private. While I was writing this review, a news story popped up in my Bluesky feed that Flurry, a data analytics company, recently paid $3.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for improperly harvesting the data users fed into Flo. It’s been more than a decade since Janet Vertesi, writing in Time, described how her efforts to dodge the internet’s pregnancy-marketing laser beam pushed her to the shadowy margins of anonymized accounts, incognito browsing, and all-cash payments. Hess enlists a reverse-tracking system to discover that a single WebMD search sent up a flare that ignited the entire ecosystem. Then, when she was 14 weeks pregnant, the pandemic hit, and the blaze burst any containment. More anxious and isolated than ever before, expectant and new parents were more susceptible than they had ever been to anyone with something to sell—a product, an app, an ideology. Before those isolation years, there were corners of the internet untouched by commerce; it has since been, as Hess puts it, “razed, pumped with capital, and rebuilt as a platform for monetizing influence.” Now most of us have accepted that our privacy is the price of admission to its sunny, soft-pink uplands.
This all feels crass, invasive, vaguely sinister—but is it really harmful? Does it matter that, as Hess tells us, Flo was founded by men who saw a profit to be made? The female founder of a different app, Clue, insists that it absolutely “matters who builds technology and why we build it,” but Hess’s own critique of this technology is somewhat muted, and her acquiescence to it wryly relatable. Told not to google a worrying diagnosis or seek out the underbelly of unvetted Facebook groups, she immediately dives into the abyss. Rather than yearning for some lost Eden of unmediated parenting, Hess accepts that we are all, now, dwellers in “the digital age,” and she navigates that landscape with humor and nuance. Implicit in her story is the powerful, discomfiting argument that if we want to counter the excesses of this technology, we must first be honest about our dependence on it.
Every pregnancy and birth has its story, but telling them can be like describing a dream, full of surreal time-jumps and scrambled by memory and fear—compelling to the narrator but crushingly boring to any listener, until she learns to shape it to a recognizable plot. The Flo app, Hess notes, helps make pregnancy comprehensible in a distinctly modern way: Flo “chopped it into events, shaped it into episodes, dropped them over the course of a season that built toward my September due date.” But when a routine ultrasound in her seventh month flags something unexpected, the story veers off in a new direction, a “diagnostic odyssey.” Instead of a neatly wrapped TV drama, Hess’s pregnancy becomes a disjointed sequence of scenes: the encounter with the one-eyed MRI monster; the fight to block the siren song of online “freebirthers,” who reject the tyranny of Western medicine; the relief of escaping one whirlpool only to plunge into another. On this odyssey, Hess realizes, she is now truly alone: “The Internet had nothing left to sell me.” Searching Flo’s secret user forums for “abnormality” yields no results. But sailing alone past all the charlatans and monsters brings her in the end to a deeper knowledge, to “authority over my own pregnancy.” It turns out there are doctors who have devoted their careers to studying her baby’s rare genetic condition, who are able to advise on what needs to be done, from the moment of birth, to minimize its risks and harms.
The odyssey also brings Hess to question many of the received thought patterns around disability and difference, and to probe the buried eugenic impulses under a phrase as innocuous as a “healthy baby.” Healthy, she realizes in the context of prenatal testing, really means “normal,” which in turn means that the child is a “blank slate” on which parents can write a story they like. But as advances in that technology make it possible to alert parents to any number of potential abnormalities in their fetus, so the possibility of obtaining a “TFMR” or “termination for medical reasons” narrows to vanishing point. Where Hess can sometimes seem cavalier about the harms of the digital world, it is mostly because she is clear-eyed about the very real, very offline dangers facing pregnant people in the United States since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For instance, Hess points out that despite widely touted fears, there has not (yet) been a single reported instance of a period-tracker app alerting state authorities to a user’s illicit abortion or flagging her as an unfit mother. Most of the time, it’s doctors and nurses who trigger these alarms, under long-standing “fetal endangerment” laws that typically ensnare and punish vulnerable, poor, nonwhite women. The state, embodied in our fellow human beings, has been engaged in the business of surveilling women for a very long time.
I should note that my reading of Hess’s book is unavoidably colored by my own history. Her pregnancy, and the birth of her son in September 2020, trails my own family’s experience by only a little over six months, but the pandemic makes our experiences radically divergent. I was pregnant in the before times: My husband came to my appointments with me, I did prenatal yoga in a room of 30 other women, and I took birthing classes in the cozy living room of a local doula, whose notions of natural birth I might have avoided if I encountered them online, but to which, in person, I could listen with discernment, hearing a real person’s curiosity, humor, and experience. We never finished the course, as our son was born three and a half weeks early, but we took him to the birthing class to do a live newborn show-and-tell. Had he arrived on his due date of March 22, in the most restrictive week of New York City’s lockdown, I’d have labored entirely alone. As it was, across town from where Hess would give birth that fall, I sat in a crowded waiting room, reading news of Italy’s Covid outbreak on my phone, then spent two days and nights in a shared hospital room, separated only by a curtain from another new mother. The only people who wore masks and gloves were the nurses, whipping them on and off with deft unthinking speed. A couple weeks later, this busy, human normality fell away. As I sat up nights, feeding my son, sirens screamed past the window.
Like Hess, I felt acutely how the eerie isolation of the early pandemic sharpened the solitude of caring for a newborn, and I identified with her yearning for some communal relief. Wouldn’t the “inefficient, depressing, and dull” burden of caregiving, she writes, be lightened by being shared? Turns out there’s a meme for that: a millennial mother asking with naïve optimism, “So, when does the village show up?” The joke’s on her, a woman who has turned her back on the wisdom of previous generations, moved hundreds of miles away from her family, and is now disappointed to discover that a community isn’t available to order online. Seeking it there, among the disembodied scammers, scolds, and cranks, can leave parents feeling even more alone than before. As one scholar Hess talks to puts it, “There’s an emptiness to online communities too—a lack of accountability.” Nobody on a Reddit forum has to look you in the face if their advice makes you sick, and they can’t reach through the screen to stop the baby screaming.
These spaces offer some comforts, to be sure, especially when they are knit together by shared experiences or demographics. The users of the thousand-dollar Snoo “smart bassinet,” at ease in their class privilege, are comfortable “whining and preening” in a private kaffeeklatsch of peers, where no one will be called out for said privilege. Among the followers of the parenting community Big Little Feelings, which started on Instagram in March 2020, the reassurance of community derives from generational identity: millennials, convinced that being kind to their children constitutes a revolution. (After George Floyd’s murder, the account’s response was an earnest suggestion, “punctuated by sparkle emojis,” that firm, loving boundaries could make racism a no-no for a whole generation.) Yet when Hess turns in curiosity to a 1948 copy of Dr. Spock’s parenting guide, looking for evidence of the monstrous parenting mistakes of previous generations, she encounters instead the advice to become a “friendly leader”—which I know from my own motherhood internet is almost exactly the signature phrase of another pandemic-era parenting guru, Dr. Becky.
It could have been easy to dunk on the dystopia of it all, but Hess avoids that easy path, staying in the muddled middle where most of us live. “All I wanted to post was baby,” she admits, but nothing will make you realize the radical gulf between the internet and real life like baby. At the end of the book, Hess visits a costly women’s empowerment retreat, the IRL manifestation of an online freebirthing community, where, in short order, she encounters a virulent transphobe and a quack doctor touting cures rooted (surprise surprise) in antisemitic conspiracies. The experience is jarring and clarifying. The “nonsense” that the doctor spouts when Hess asks about her son’s genetic condition is so glaring that it lights up a truth: Her child is a person, irreducible to the algorithm. Yawning behind the confidence of real and fake doctors, machines and message boards, is the uncertainty, vast and existential, of this baby’s particular body and his particular life. And there is ultimately no other way to parent, in any age and circumstance, than by sailing right off into it.
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