In her book Second Life, Amanda Hess explores pregnancy, technology, and the problem of the surveillance of the pregnant body. Hess’s book is a well-written picture of a moment in time, when technology has offered mothers so much, while society is offering less and less. And it’s a reminder that there is no way to hack or disrupt parenting.
You can read a more detailed essay about the book, parenting anxiety, and the same old myths guiding our new technologies in Wednesday’s newsletter.
Amanda joined me to talk about the SNOO, the false security of safety devices, and how parents who eschew tech and parents who embrace it are, in the end, all the same.
LL: You had this insight in your book where you talked about how we rely on products like the SNOO because we don’t have an effective social safety net or decent parental leave in America. So technologies like this help to fill that void.
AH: I think at some point I started keeping a running list of every product or digital community that was, or podcast that was branding itself as your village. And there was something that I found to be so cynical about that branding because on the one hand, it completely worked on me — especially because my son was born in the fall of 2020, and I live in New York. We were worried about the baby, we were worried about our parents. There was no vaccine.
So I was just the most vulnerable that I could have been to this idea that no one is coming to help you, so you need to buy a product instead that will do it.
And one of the things that I find really, that really annoys me about the “village” construction is that it harks back to this lost time. It suggests that can never come back; we'll never have it again. So it’s this idea that because we live in this urban technological hellscape now, there's just no other option but to buy a robot to do this work for us. And I think that's so untrue. We can remake the world to be more supportive of communal living and people's needs, whether they're parents or newborns or children or anybody else. It's just not necessarily going to look like a twee village.
“And certainly, baby brands don't want to bring up death. They want to project these images of perfectly healthy, happy babies. And I found that there were people I talked to who appreciated that they did that. But at the same time, they are taking these traumas and projecting them to every family, every parents, every potential consumer, and there's a way in which one family's trauma can become another family's irrational incentive to buy a device they don't need.”
—Amanda Hess
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LL: That gets to the heart of something important: How do we live as modern people in this world where everything is being monetized but nothing is being fixed? Yes, women don’t have a lot of information about their bodies. And we should have it; we need it. And, yet is this the way?
AH: I had this experience with the FLOW app where I started using it before I was thinking about pregnancy, and I was using it to track my period because I had what I now recognize as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), where I became very, very, very low and depressed before my period.
And so this app, what it allowed me to do was to understand when my period was coming and understand that I was not truly suicidal, I was just getting my period. But that is a use case where I would only have to use the app once a month, and if you are making an app, you don't want an app that's only used once a month, and so you need to put all of these bells and whistles in it that try to convince people to keep opening it. I found that for me, when I started trying to get pregnant, and then when I was pregnant, that was the thing where it just clicked and worked, where I was opening the app 10 times a day when I was pregnant.
LL: We need to know more about our bodies, and yet it comes at such a price.
AH: As I was writing this book, the relationship between commercial surveillance and government surveillance was something that I was really trying to puzzle out. One of the things that I wanted to make sure that the book was engaged in is the idea that it's not just period apps that represent a threat to our privacy; it's also our doctors, which is so difficult to wrap one's brain around. It's so much easier to say, oh, delete your app, it's stupid and you really don't need it. But you can't just delete prenatal care. I mean, there are some people who I write about who do, but I wouldn't recommend that. So it’s become this representation of a problem that's so much more widespread and insidious than I think we give it credit for.
LL: You make this point clearly in the book that every technology designed for our freedom becomes a trap in a way. So how did you find yourself navigating that?
AH: I became fascinated with people who completely reject medical care because it represented to me the opposite of the path that I had gone down. And yet there were so many conceptual overlaps in that we were all trying to assert this kind of control over our births in very different ways, and we're not necessarily any of us successful at that.
I love medicine and it would not have gone well for me to try to just give birth to my children alone. But the medical resources that we need in order to give birth safely are wrapped up in this profit-driven system that has a history and present of patriarchal racism. And having it be the most intimate possible thing and the most profound experience where you're literally creating another person, of course it's incredibly fraught.
But I think the problem is you can't simply opt out. You can't just be like, well, I'm not going to do any of that and I'll just do it myself. You're still making a choice, and a bad choice, because you're in this bad system. Your choice is still directed and informed by the system.
“During pregnancy, I think there's a very insidious expectation that women just completely give up their self and their body toward directing this future life.”
—Amanda Hess
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LL: You talked about Ambroise Paré, who wrote On Monsters and Marvels, which I also became obsessed with — I own two copies of the book because I read it so much that it fell apart. Your book discusses the theory of maternal impressions, and how it still resonates today.
AH: I also love this book. There are illustrations and there's something about it where — whenever I had a feeling that made me uncomfortable about this stuff, it was always clarifying to look at the version of it that was ascendant 100 or 200 or 300 years ago because it looks obviously bizarre now and clearly false.
And one thing about my relationship with the internet and technology is that I really feel like it launders these old ideas through these shiny new forms and gives them a new shape that makes them somewhat unrecognizable. And just by tracing the history of their ideologies, it ended up being really clarifying for me.
There's this thing where — my kids are 2 and 4, and I have so little control over them. The control I have is that the lock in our apartment is too high for them to reach, so they can't get out. But there's this fantasy when you're pregnant that, okay, they're in your body, you can control everything. Obviously your kids' environment shapes them, but you also can't really control much about that. During pregnancy, I think there's a very insidious expectation that women just completely give up their self and their body toward directing this future life.
LL: That actually brings up another question I wanted to ask you about is that sense of control. Because I mean, you were dealing with some very real fears. Fears that were not just in your head, but manifested through testing that was being done on your son. And the promise of medicalized gadgets offered a sense of control of those fears.
AH:I found the kind of medicalization of baby gadgets to be so interesting, and just the idea that when the baby monitor first came about, it was really in conversation with the Lindbergh baby abduction, and it was satisfying this fear among parents of some intruder coming in and taking their baby. So if you had a baby monitor, you would be able to hear their steps or whatever.
I had this experience in pregnancy where my doctor detected some abnormalities in the fetus when I was seven months pregnant, and then I got a second opinion from a doctor who thought that these abnormalities were catastrophic brain abnormalities, and that ended up not being the case.
But something about going through that experience — it was like the medical system leading me toward this catastrophizing outcome, something that my brain wanted to do anyway, which was like, catastrophize, your baby's going to die.
Those were thoughts that were already swimming around somewhere in there that just happened to be encouraged by certain ultrasound technologies that I came to understand are not psychic. They're doing their best, but they're not psychic.
And I think having that experience helped me. It helped to cleanse me of that catastrophizing thing. There was something protective about that — that the things I had to worry about, I knew exactly what they were
I didn't have this boundless anxiety that didn't have a shape. And I think that these technologies can help give shape to those anxieties and to help you project them onto the device.
For example, Owlet is a baby company and a lot of their branding and brand community building is around supporting parents who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, child loss, and there's an extent to which those are things that we don't want to talk about.
And certainly, baby brands don't want to bring up death. They want to project these images of perfectly healthy, happy babies. And I found that there were people I talked to who appreciated that they did that. But at the same time, they are taking these traumas and projecting them to every family, every parent, every potential consumer, and there's a way in which one family's trauma can become another family's irrational incentive to buy a device they don't need.
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