Amanda Hess on free birth, “momtech,” and her book Second Life

I started reading Amanda Hess’s work in the early 2010s when her columns about gender and tech for Slate made me laugh throughout a particularly absurd period for online feminism. A decade later, she’s written a book, Second Life, that brings over a decade of immersion in digital culture to bear on one of today’s weirdest experiences: becoming a parent while extremely online.

Amanda has two kids. Her first was born with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a rare condition that can involve an enlarged tongue and vulnerability to certain diseases. In writing about how menstruation, pregnancy, and giving birth have become hybrid digital experiences, she also considers how disability sheds light on languages, practices, and subcultures of the reproductive world. I began by asking her about her visit, described in the book, to a summer camp devoted to believers in free birthing that seemed like a cross between the eerie solstice festival in Midsommar and John Malkovich’s cult compound in Opus. —Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD So, tell me about your interest in people who free birth.

AMANDA HESS Because so much of my experience in pregnancy and early parenthood was mediated by technology, I became really skeptical of these technologies and interested in what happens when you take your skepticism to the extreme. 

The practice of giving birth totally unassisted without a doctor or a midwife is often dangerous to the person who’s giving birth. It’s dangerous for the baby. What I found is that it can also promote this extreme ideology of individualism where the mother becomes the only person responsible for the health and survival of her child. She’s expected to completely devote herself to achieving her peak feminine duty, encouraged to cleanse and purify her own body. Meanwhile, the suffering of some women and children, particularly disabled children, was accepted. After I gave birth to a child with a disability, I became fascinated with how they represented a disdain for my child. 

One of the things that I found most interesting about the various subjects that I tackle in the book is that there is a eugenic strain to all of them, both a techno-eugenic strain and an anti-technology strain, this kind of natural selection thing. I was interested in where our experiences converged and where they diverged.

SL Yeah, there’s a lot here about a pregnant person’s obligation to control everything happening in their mind and body, whether through this sort of purification or through constant digital monitoring.

AH I think I came to understand why someone might reject vaccines. Where women are raised in conservative cultures or really religious cultures, they’re instructed from a very young age that it’s going to be their job to become a mother. And later it becomes clearer that it’s their job to completely sacrifice themselves to create a healthy child — although really it’s about creating a normal child. And if you do all of that and have a child with a disability, then you’re also thrust into this reality where you’re still living in our individualist society and you have so little support. I can totally understand why you might want to find an external explanation for why this has happened rather than perceive yourself to have failed in some way. I also don’t think anyone should be making a profit from vaccines — that certainly muddles the issue. So there are some ways in which I think the anti-vax ideology is gesturing towards some real problems, even as it has the wrong solutions.

SL This book starts out with you tracking your menstrual cycle in the Flo app, which talks to you in ridiculous marketing language, very “you got this mama.” But you also dig into the guts of these apps and come away with some interesting findings about how we represent pregnancy and how it’s been monetized.

AH I chose Flo because it was the first thing that came up when I searched for a period app. It’s the dominant app and it’s the first femtech company to have achieved unicorn status. It’s valued at a billion dollars and it was created by two men. As I was starting to understand how it functioned, not just technologically but also ideologically, I started testing out some other pregnancy apps. I really liked Clue, which was created in large part by this Danish entrepreneur, Ida Tin. For one thing, it doesn’t assume [in its messages to you via the app] how thrilled you are about your pregnancy.

Even though I was someone who had a wanted pregnancy, I was not always thrilled about my pregnancy and the visuals I found in the apps were really interesting. There are so many pregnancy apps that use a supposedly realistic CGI fetus. It looks like a little mini baby that’s put inside a celestial orb and that’s supposed to represent your child. I felt this real sense of violation later in my pregnancy when I had an abnormal ultrasound and I came to realize that obviously the stock CGI fetus in my app is not a direct representation of what my child’s body looks like. Clue does have a rendering of a fetus, but it’s a shaky line drawing. And that to me is suggesting that it’s a sketch, it’s not reality. There are just little things about how it’s designed that I think are ideologically less damaging. 

I spoke with Ida Tin and she felt that her app did not always do a great job of making money, which is something that it needs to do in order to continue to exist. But to some extent that’s why Clue is better — it’s less monetized. 

SL I was struck by how Flo actually seemed like some sort of pro-life propaganda tool. That image of the fetus is just so evocative of that world. You write a bit about abortion in this book, which I really liked because I think that’s a topic often absent from books about pregnancy or motherhood. What did you make of these apps from a political point of view?

AH One of the things that surprised me was just how much prenatal technology was to some extent aligned with the anti-abortion movement — particularly the imaging, the actual ability to represent a fetus in some way. If you were to actually try to make a realistic image of what a fetus looked like, which is inside of a person, you wouldn’t have the vantage point to take a photo like the ones in the apps. It would just be surrounded by the gunk of the parent’s body.

I was interested in these images that were created by the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson in the 1960s. He took what he called photographs of life before birth and his photographs were heralded as the first photographs of fetuses. He had this photograph of what he described as a living fetus on the cover of Life magazine in 1965. And then when I ordered the magazine and opened it up, there was a little clarification inside that said that this particular fetus had been removed from its mother surgically. It was an image of an abortion and then this image of an abortion ended up being incorporated into a lot of anti-abortion propaganda.

Just the fact of being pregnant put me so in such close contact with the aesthetics of the anti-abortion movement, even though many women who have wanted pregnancies and have children have had abortions, or go on to have abortions later. It’s not like by virtue of having a child you become aligned with the anti-abortion movement, but that’s how it’s stylized sometimes.

SL You go into some serious internet research spirals in this book, an experience that’s pretty relatable beyond pregnancy. I’m curious there was something about researching a pregnancy that felt unique. 

AH I came to understand that people who chose free birth were trying to control their pregnancies in a particular way through their diet and sunbathing and breathing exercises, and I was trying to control mine through information. At the same time, I don’t know that I would do anything differently. The truth is you’re googling in this context where the people you love are not getting enough real medical care or attention.

SL You write about very online “medical moms” who document their children’s experiences dealing with serious illnesses and managing the medical system in order to secure care. They post TikToks, photos, and generally document their experience in a way that feels structurally similar to influencers.

AH I became really interested in the figure of the medical mom that was being reproduced through these images. My husband’s the medical parent, really, so I felt like I could not claim this kind of warrior status that these women were projecting. But I also found myself really uncomfortable with how the medical mom persona interacted with the image of the disabled child or the chronically ill child. 

I remember being in a surgery recovery room with one of my children as he was screaming — and there was no amount of pain medication that could get him to stop screaming. Meanwhile, I was trying to pump breast milk for my other child who was a few hundred miles away at home. I’ve just never felt less equipped to do a thing. And I think in situations like that, you can forget that your child is much more vulnerable than you are. By using their image in order to convey your experience, you’re also exposing them.

I’ve taken down all of their photographs from my social media, but I think that in writing about my kids’ medical experiences, I’m still doing something that’s incredibly selfish. I’m doing it because I felt like I needed to in order to understand my own life and experiences. If you’re a parent, your life often becomes your kids; if you are a medical parent, that’s even more true. I think people need ways to talk about their lives and to share their experiences — I’m just not sure where the line is. 

SL So, momtech — good or bad?

AH We’re really robbed of the ability to know whether technology is good or bad for parents or children or anyone else because it is for the most part, not being developed to meet the needs of human beings. It’s being developed to increase profits of corporations. These technologies are designed to replace human experiences, the fragile, complex, messy parts of being a human, with frictionless isolation. 

I think it’s most obvious to me with the Snoo, which is this robotic bassinet that I used. Parents of young children are often just in a really desperate situation, dealing with trauma from pregnancy and birth. The built environment ignores the existence of children just as it ignores any disabled person. There’s no real social safety net. Childcare is so outrageously expensive, even as the wages for childcare workers are unacceptably low. You can’t just buy a functioning society — but what you can do is buy a crib that promises to optimize your child’s sleep so that they stay in bed for an hour longer. 

SL You quote some socialist-feminist thinkers like bell hooks who have envisioned more collective ways of caring for children in modern times, like the collective kitchen or the collective daycare. Did you find something that seemed aspirational in those readings?

AH When I had kids, I came to really fantasize about the public kitchen. My four-year-old’s in public school now and they feed him so many meals and snacks and it’s so great — it just makes sense to do that at a scale. There’s this very precious way that individualization is sold, where you want very fine control over the precise food that your child is eating because you think it has implications for their neurological development or whatever. I think that’s all bullshit. 

The closest thing I found is joining a mutual aid WhatsApp. First of all, I get the dopamine hit of receiving messages all the time and instead of it being somebody in my neighborhood talking about which stroller they should buy, it’s about syncing community needs with people’s availability. I just don’t have time to go somewhere where my kids aren’t allowed — in these ad hoc structures, kids are welcome. I can bring my kids to a distribution line. I can make a tray of food at night and feed my kids the same thing that day. It’s important in some small ways to orient my family life toward the community. They’re set up to do just that and I’m so grateful for them.