Having a Child in the Digital Age  ## Metadata - Author: [[Fresh Air]] - Full Title: Having a Child in the Digital Age - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d77bd318-02c5-49c5-b51f-c85fc57cf016 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Waiting for Ultrasound News** - Amanda Hess describes waiting for the ultrasound results with fears fueled by her pregnancy experiences. - She mentally searched the internet for stories of lucky outcomes among abnormal ultrasound cases. Transcript: Tonya Mosley And at the time, you were seven months pregnant. What did the doctor share with you? Amanda Hess He told me that he saw something that he didn't like. And that phrase has really stuck with me. But what he saw was something that when I saw it, I thought was cute, which is that my son was sticking out his tongue. And that's abnormal if the baby is, like, not just bringing the tongue back into the mouth. Although, of course, I didn't know that at the time. After, you know, several weeks of tests when I was about eight months pregnant, we learned that my son has Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which is an overgrowth disorder that, among Other things, can cause a child to have a very enlarged tongue. Tonya Mosley One of the things you do in your writing that's really powerful is you integrate the ways that technology really infiltrates every waking moment of our lives, including this particular Moment when the doctor looked at your ultrasound. And I'd like for you to read about this moment just before you receive that news from the doctor. You're on the sonogram table. You're waiting for the doctor to arrive. And as you're lying there with that goo that they put on your stomach to allow for the ultrasound wand to glide over your pregnant belly, your mind begins to race. Can I have you read that passage? Amanda Hess Sure. The errors I made during my pregnancy knocked at the door of my mind. I drank a glass and a half of wine on Mark's birthday before I knew I was pregnant. I swallowed a tablet of Ativan for acute anxiety after I knew. I took a long hot bath that crinkled my fingertips. I got sick with a fever and fell asleep without thinking about it. I waited until I was almost 35 years old to get pregnant. I wanted to solve the question of myself before bringing another person into the world. But the answer had not come. Now my pregnancy was, in the language of obstetrics, geriatric. For seven months, we'd all acted like a baby was going to come out of my body like a rabbit yanked from a hat. The same body that ordered mozzarella sticks from the late night menu and stared into a computer like it had a soul. The body that had, just a few years prior, snorted a key of cocaine supplied by the party bus driver hired to transport it to medieval times. This body was now working very seriously to generate a new human. I had posed the body for Instagram, clutching my bump with two hands as if it might bounce away. I had bought a noise machine with a womb setting and thrown away the box. Now I lay on the table as the doctor stood in his chamber, rewinding the tape of my life. My phone sat on an empty chair six feet away. Smothered beneath my smug maternity dress, it blinked silently with text messages from Mark. 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. I could consult the pregnant women who came before me, dust off their old message board posts, and read of long-ago ultrasounds that found weird ears and stuck-out tongues. They had dropped their babies' fates into the internet like coins into a fountain, and I would scrounge through them all, looking for the lucky penny. For the woman who returned to say, it turned out to be nothing. ([Time 0:02:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/744b743d-bb89-4535-8147-f61a7ac48220)) - **The Weight of Maternal Blame** - Medical language and technology contribute to maternal blame and guilt during pregnancy complications. - Historical ideas like maternal impression linger subtly, intensifying judgment on pregnant women's bodies. Transcript: Tonya Mosley And that moment seemed to crystallize kind of this deeper fear about your body and how it surveilled and judged, especially in pregnancy. Can you talk just a little bit about how technology also kind of fed into your judgment about yourself? Amanda Hess Yeah. You know, I started to think about writing a book about technology before I became pregnant, not sort of planning to focus it on this time in my life. And then instantly, once I became pregnant, my relationship with technology became so much more intense. And I really felt myself being influenced by what it was telling me. I'm someone who, you know, I understand that reproduction is a normal event, but it really came as a shock to me when there was a person growing inside of me and I felt like I really didn't Know what to do. And so I also, you know, early in my pregnancy didn't want to talk to any people about it. So I turned to the internet. I turned to apps. Later when my child was born, I turned to gadgets. And it was only later that I really began to understand that these technologies work as narrative devices. And they were working in my life to tell me a certain story about my role as a parent and the expectations for my child. Tonya Mosley I want to go back a little bit to deepen what you're saying here to that undercurrent of, I think you use the term in the book, maternal impression that creeps into modern medicine, this Notion that your thoughts and feelings and anxieties can physically mark your child. In your case, as you are on the Internet, you're reading, you're connecting with other would-be mothers and mothers, your medical chart flagged this single dose of Ativan that you Took early in your pregnancy as teratogen exposure with that root terata meaning monster. And Ativan, I should know, is this anti-anxiety medicine that you took during this moment when you were really stressed out with work. You wrote, actually, when I decoded its medical terminology, it said that I had created a monster. Now, two things that stood out to me about this. First, I hadn't considered how blame and guilt are almost baked into the medical system just through terminology. And I also wondered, once that doctor said that thing to you at seven months when you were on the table, did you have to convince yourself that you didn't cause your son's condition? Amanda Hess I mean, I think I just assumed I did until much later when I started to feel as if it didn't really matter how it happened, that I had created my son and he was wonderful and I was capable as His mother. But I carried that idea with me for such a long time. I think what was so clarifying about looking up the medical terminology was that hundreds of years ago, there was this idea of the maternal imagination or the maternal impression, Which is a pseudoscientific idea that a pregnant woman can, you know, see a monkey in the zoo, her child will come out with like ape-like traits or that she could see some kind of monstrous Thing and that her child will come out to resemble a monster. And this was an explanation for birth defects. And I found that even though all of those ideas had been, you know, discredited, there was still this undercurrent of blame that was really palpable to me. And I even found that at a certain point, you know, after my pregnancy had been flagged as high risk and fetal abnormalities had been found in my son, it was me and my pregnancy that became The thing that people with normal pregnancies were advised to avoid. So I would read anti-anxiety books that said, you know, don't spend time thinking about pregnancy complications because they're quite rare. ([Time 0:06:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/95ab579c-d86a-47c3-a44b-8f9d3c80bec6)) - **Isolation in Apps and Real-Life Meeting** - Hess found pregnancy apps excluded abnormal pregnancies, deepening isolation. - Meeting her son in person dissolved fears shaped by internet portrayals of disability. Transcript: Amanda Hess You know, I spent the beginning part of my pregnancy using an app called Flow, and Flow presents you with this CGI kind of fetus poppet that looks like a very cute pre-baby and is floating Around in this like ethereal mist. And again, it sounds so ludicrous, but when I was holding that in my hand, it felt on some emotional level like I was looking at my baby. And then, you know, once doctors began to find some abnormalities on the actual medical portal to my body in the ultrasound, I realized that, of course, this image that Flo had promoted To me was a lie. It has no special insight into the baby inside of me, obviously. And I also came to understand that it promotes this idea to all of the hundreds of millions of people who use it during pregnancy, that that is what their baby ought to look like. That is what they should expect their baby to look like. And once I realized that wasn't the case, you know, I wanted to see images of people like my son. I wanted to understand what his life would be like. And I wanted to understand what my life would be like as a caretaker for him. So I started like deep Googling Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, and what I found was a lot of tabloid news of the weird reports about children born with extra large tongues. Of these babies, I found parents of children who had the condition, who were asking for funds for medical care or presenting their children's lives, trying to raise awareness of it And look for acceptance. And I found the response to those people ranged from appreciation to disgust. And it was not until my son was born. I remember two minutes before my son was born, my doctor finally recommended that I have a C-section. And after like 24 hours of labor or something I was ready for it um but I cried and I realized that I was crying because I was afraid I was afraid to meet my son and and the minute I did like and He was a person finally who I had a real relationship with. All of these imagined images of him and potential lives for him dissolved. ([Time 0:13:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/70d44e3b-fb31-4b70-82ea-3028f3686bf9)) - **Tech Gap in Prenatal Care** - Advanced screening tech for embryos caters mainly to affluent parents via IVF, creating a reproductive tech gap. - Investment skews towards preventing disabilities rather than supporting those living with them. Transcript: Tonya Mosley I'm thinking about like some of the big technologies that are coming into fruition now or already there, like OpenAI, Sam Altman's funding of the genomic prediction, which is supposedly Going to offer embryo tests predicting everything from diabetes risk to potential IQ of a baby. But you actually point this out in the book that there is a growing divide because on one there are these affluent parents who have access to this kind of screening. And then on the other, many parents can't even get basic access to prenatal care. How did your experience kind of help you reflect on those extremes? Amanda Hess You know, I think after the particular circumstances of my pregnancy, I became really interested in prenatal testing and how it was advancing. And interested in the fact that it was so, it seemed like such an exciting category for all of the male tech leaders that we know so much about now. And, you know, it was only through like reading about them a little bit that I came to understand that this new ascendant technology that offers what they call polygenic analysis of Embryos. So, you know, different outlets promise to find different characteristics, but they're offering everything from screening that predicts an increase in IQ points that screens for Hereditary cancers. All of this stuff is something that you can only use if you're going to go through IVF. And so after paying for this embryo screening, which is a few thousand dollars, you're also choosing to go through in vitro fertilization, which is not only just a really difficult Experience for many people, but extremely expensive and out of reach for most people. And as I was reading one story about this, I was really struck by a woman who founded one of these companies who told one of her investors that instead of going through IVF herself, she Should simply hire a surrogate and have her do it for her. And that, to me, really crystallized this idea of like a reproductive technology gap. I think the thing that worries me the most about these technologies is, again, there seems to be so much interest and investment in understanding what certain children will be like And trying to prevent children with certain differences and very little investment in the care for those children, research that could help these children and adults. ([Time 0:27:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/182ffc2f-0aa5-4e57-9ada-91cdc2b23fcd)) - **Surveillance Tech and Parenthood** - Surveillance tech for babies blurs care and control, making parents feel watched and children observed unnervingly. - Children perceive baby monitors as mechanical eyes, complicating intimacy. Transcript: Tonya Mosley So your work as a cultural critic, you often touch on surveillance, both state and personal. And in this book, you describe how new parents also surround themselves with surveillance tech. So baby monitors and nursery cameras that are constantly watching. And of course, in our daily life, we're all under so many forms of surveillance. How do you think this surveillance culture is affecting us? Or how did it affect you in those early days as a mother, when you've got that baby monitor in your baby's room? Like, are we habituating our children to be watched 24-7? Amanda Hess I think we are. I mean, I had this experience of during pregnancy, habituating myself to some external authority watching my pregnancy. And then after my child was born, I became the authority who was watching him and surveilling him. And I think there's this way that surveillance can become confused with care and attention and love. And I had this experience with my kids where I'd installed this fancy baby monitor that I was testing out for the book and the video was uploaded to some cloud server so I could watch it From anywhere. I could watch them if they were taking a nap in their crib, but I was at the coffee shop down the street or whatever and somebody else was there with them. And it could make it seem as if I were close to them because I would see my adorable children and have this experience of being able to just watch them sleep peacefully, which is so different From the experience of dealing with them most of the time. But it wasn't until one night when the camera was set up and I laid down with my son in his bed and I sensed this presence in the corner of the room, these like four red glowing eyes. Oh, you could see it from his perspective. Yes, that I could really see it from his perspective. And like he's not seeing, you know, this beautiful, smiling image of me watching him like he's seeing four mechanical eyes. ([Time 0:31:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1933dc32-2037-4dca-b3d4-77c7f7bd3fe0)) - **Robotic Crib and Parental Challenge** - Hess tried the robotic crib SNU, which promised longer baby sleep. - Instead, it complicated understanding her son's sleep, blurring child behavior with machine operation. Transcript: Amanda Hess Yeah, I had this experience with my son where I heard about a robotic crib called the SNU. Before he was born, I got this secondhand version off of a parental listserv and set it up before he was born. So it was just sitting there waiting for him to come sleep in it. And the SNU promises that SNU babies tend to sleep one to two hours more than other babies, which is such a tantalizing promise to a new parent. Like one to two hours is so many hours for a parent of a newborn. And my son just really didn't take to the SNU. And I spent such a long time like trying to troubleshoot the snoo to try to get it to work for my baby until eventually I found that I was really like troubleshooting my child. And he had become so entwined with the technology that I really didn't know where the workings of the machine ended and where my son's, you know, sleep patterns began. And so this technology that's often sold as a tool to help us better understand our kids and get like data insights into them. In this case for me, it actually made it more difficult for me to understand what was going on with him and like how he ([Time 0:35:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00c1ea2e-350a-4a5a-9ca7-38cdbdc8e58f)) - **Digital Communities and Technology’s Limits** - Online communities provide indispensable support for rare disorders and disability justice amid physical isolation. - However, profit-driven tech limits the internet’s full potential for positive human connection and care. Transcript: Tonya Mosley That's the subtitle. How are you feeling about the future of raising a child in the digital age? Do you see like any positive trends in digital culture for the next generation? Or do you kind of worry about these issues that we've talked about? Will they only intensify? Where are you on this now? Amanda Hess Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing that I don't want to think about is just that very soon, like, my kids will have access to devices, whether it's at school or in our home, where they Can just, like, log on themselves and see what's out there. It's something that I'm just, like, not prepared to deal with at the moment. There are, like, a couple of things that I was so grateful to have access to during my pregnancy that I hope will be helpful for my kids. And one was, you know, groups that are dedicated to the particular rare disorder that my son has, where people who have the syndrome or family members who are caretakers can come together And just talk about their experiences. And just seeing the thousands of people who are members of these groups and seeing those numbers is so comforting to me because it reminds me that my son is not alone. We were not alone with him. There is this whole community of people who have, you know, they look the same in some way. They experience some of the same social stigmas. They experience some of the same medical traumas and medical experiences. They just don't exist in a geographical community because the condition is too rare. So these groups are a real reminder for me that the internet can be such a balm to communities of people who can't, you know, access each other offline. And similarly, like, I think the disability justice community is such like a wonderful community that I hope that my son, whether he ends up identifying as disabled or not, has some Access to. And that is really helped by just the accommodation of being able to meet online. And so I think there are so many ways that my kids could find solace there. But I really think we're just, we're so robbed of the ability to understand what good technology would look like because technology is not for the very most part being developed for The betterment of human beings. It's being developed to drive profits. And so all of these like wonderful parts of online communities are embedded in that capitalist structure and they're held hostage by it. And so I really think to the extent, like, I don't think phones are the problem. I don't think the internet is the problem. I think these devices are indicative, unfortunately, of much larger problems. And it's really going to take, like, the socialization of technology in order for us to really understand its potential as, like, something that's positive for us and our children. ([Time 0:37:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/87219bab-8234-4eca-a87b-908e8a6c1ba1))