When NYT critic-at-large Amanda Hess learned her unborn child had an abnormality, she turned to the internet — but didn't find reassurance. "My relationship with technology became so much more intense," she says. She talks with Tonya Mosley about pregnancy apps, online forums, and baby gadgets. Her new book is Second Life: Having A Child In The Digital Age. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Daniel Kehlmann's new novel, The Director. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why is Amanda Hess's pregnancy story significant?
I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, I am joined by Amanda Hess. She's a journalist, cultural critic, and now author of a new memoir titled Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. The book starts with a moment every expecting parent dreads, a routine ultrasound that is suddenly not routine.
When Hess was 29 weeks pregnant, doctors spotted something that indicated her baby could have a rare genetic condition. What followed was a spiral of MRIs, genetic testing, consultations with specialists, and like many of us would do, a late-night dive into the internet for answers.
Chapter 2: How do pregnancy apps and online forums influence expecting parents?
That search led her down a rabbit hole and to fertility tech, AI-powered embryo screening, conspiracy theories, YouTube birth vlogs, the performance of motherhood on Instagram, and threaded through it all, an unsettling eugenic undercurrent suggesting which children are worth having.
Known for her commentary on internet culture and gender at the New York Times, Hess turns her critique inward, asking herself, what does it mean to become a parent while plugged into an algorithmic machine that sorts scores and sells versions of perfection and what's considered normal? Amanda Hess, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
You opened this book with a moment that I mentioned, soon-to-be parents fear. That's a routine ultrasound that shows a potential abnormality. And at the time, you were seven months pregnant. What did the doctor share with you?
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 not just bringing the tongue back into the mouth. Although, of course, I didn't know that at the time.
After 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.
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Chapter 3: What role does technology play in modern parenting decisions?
One of the things you do in your writing that's really powerful is you integrate the ways that technology works. 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? Sure.
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.
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Chapter 4: How does Amanda Hess describe her experience with medical and online information?
They had dropped their baby's 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. Trick of light.
Thank you so much for reading that, Amanda. I think that every soon-to-be mother, every mother can really identify with that. And I think just in life, we've come to this place with our relationship with technology that we can kind of Google our way out of tough moments.
You write about receiving that first alarming warning of this abnormal pregnancy and how even before getting a second or third opinion that clarified this diagnosis, your mind didn't jump to something you did, but to something that you were. 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?
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.
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 the single dose of Ativan that you took early in your pregnancy as teratogen exposure with that root terata meaning monster.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Amanda Hess face with prenatal diagnoses?
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 see a monkey and
in the zoo and 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 discredited, there was still this undercurrent of blame that was really palpable to me.
And I even found that at a certain point 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.
As if you could do that. Right, exactly.
So I, you know, I too had anxiety and I also had pregnancy complications. And so I felt sort of like I had been brought along on this journey, this highly feminized journey that was supposed to like bring all pregnant women along and tell them what to do. And then, you know, suddenly I had been cast out and I had to sort of scurry over to a different part of the Internet.
You encountered, though, on the Internet that pseudoscience with these fringe theories. You actually encountered this influencer who suggested that your stress in life or you figuratively biting your tongue might have actually caused your babies in large tongues.
Yeah, that's true. There are certainly still pseudoscientific practitioners working, maybe more so this week than last week. I don't even know. But I did find someone who believes that things like cancer, even like the flu, COVID, are caused by internal conflicts.
And there was something about that, even though that's completely false and total nonsense, understanding that that was a cultural idea that this person was crystallizing and promoting really helped me to forgive myself. Because when you put it that way, like, it's completely ludicrous. I know that my son's... genetic condition was not caused by something I thought during pregnancy.
But at the time, there was this sub-rational part of myself that really felt that that was true.
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Chapter 6: How does Amanda Hess view the intersection of technology and disability?
Yeah, 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. Um, 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. I found Reddit threads from people who were quite cruel about the very existence 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. But I cried and I realized that I was crying because I was afraid. I was afraid to meet my son. 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. And it was really only at that moment that I realized how disability can be so divorced from its human context through these technologies and how I really needed to just meet this baby in order to put it back there.
This part of the book was really moving to me because what you're really grappling with as well is like the value of information now at our fingertips. Because on one hand, you receive that scary ultrasound and these tests, and then you're able to dig through the Internet and find all
All of these cases, which I'm sure when you talk to doctors about them, they would say like, well, those are the most extreme cases. That's why people are writing about them on the Internet. But then it puts you in kind of like this really profoundly tough position to be in because it's divorcing you from that innate identity.
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