Having a Child in the Digital Age

• Pregnancy changes your relationship with the internet from casual to deeply emotional and invested.
• Superstition around documenting pregnancy experiences reveals emotional complexity beyond logical understanding.

Pregnancy apps like Flow shift from empowering users pre-pregnancy to closely monitoring and controlling them during pregnancy with gamified visuals and daily task reminders. Amanda Hess found that such apps depict a generic fetus image that, despite being cartoonish, users emotionally perceive as a true representation of their pregnancy.

Her research uncovered the origins of these images from a 1960s photograph of a fetus that was actually aborted and later misused in anti-abortion campaigns. She warns that these apps normalize the idea of an outside authority surveilling your body, conditioning people to accept data tracking as essential for managing their pregnancy.

Despite feeling intimate and personal, the data generated from these apps is often sold cheaply and used by complex ad tracking systems that turn online searches into targeted maternity ads. This raises serious privacy concerns about how personal pregnancy data could be used, including fears around potential criminalization. Hess highlights the cultural shift where surveillance becomes equated with care in parenting technologies, but the deeper issue is the erosion of privacy and the illusion of control.

• The Flow period tracker app transforms from empowering to disciplinary during pregnancy.
• Its CGI fetus images create a false sense of seeing inside the womb, blending reproductive technology with gamification.