United States – Might 9, 2025 – In her debut memoir, Second Life: Having a Youngster within the Digital Age (Doubleday, Might 2025), Amanda Hess, a New York Occasions critic-at-large, explores how expertise has remodeled the expertise of being pregnant, childbirth, and early parenthood. Drawing on her private journey via her first being pregnant in 2020, difficult by her son’s analysis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, Hess examines the pervasive position of digital instruments—fertility apps, prenatal testing, social media, and focused promoting—in shaping fashionable motherhood. Her incisive critique, rooted in her experience as an web tradition reporter, reveals each the attract and the moral complexities of those applied sciences, providing a nuanced perspective on their impression.

Know-how’s Position in Being pregnant

Hess’s memoir highlights how expertise mediates each stage of being pregnant, usually blurring the strains between empowerment and surveillance:

1. Fertility and Interval-Monitoring Apps:
   • Hess used the Flo app to conceive, describing it as “an appealingly uninteresting online game” that guided her via hormonal cycles with reminders and nudges, in the end “unlocking” being pregnant mode (The New Republic). These apps, like Flo and Clue, acquire intimate knowledge—menstrual cycles, sexual exercise, and ovulation—promising management over conception. Nonetheless, Hess notes privateness considerations, citing a $3.5 million settlement in opposition to Flurry, an information analytics agency, for improperly harvesting Flo customers’ knowledge (The New Republic).
   • The apps’ gamified interfaces can intensify the strain to conceive, with notifications like “Child has gotten so sensible and coordinated!” (about an in-utero fetus) priming dad and mom for intensive monitoring post-birth (The Lower).
2. Prenatal Testing and Genetic Screening:
   • Throughout a routine ultrasound at seven months, Hess discovered of an abnormality in her fetus, later identified as Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a uncommon situation inflicting fast development and well being dangers (The New Yorker). Prenatal applied sciences—ultrasounds, amniocentesis, and MRIs—supplied important insights but in addition plunged her into moral dilemmas. Superior screening can detect circumstances earlier, however Hess questions their implications, noting that “wholesome” usually means “regular,” reflecting eugenic biases that equate incapacity with undesirability (The New Republic).
   • The supply of “TFMR” (termination for medical causes) is narrowing in a post-Dobbs period, complicating choices for fogeys dealing with complicated diagnoses, particularly in states with restrictive abortion legal guidelines (The New Yorker).
3. Social Media and On-line Communities:
   • Hess turned to the web for solutions throughout her being pregnant, encountering a “kaleidoscope of maternal anxiousness and management” on platforms like Instagram, Reddit, and Fb (embedded.substack). She engaged with “medical mothers” sharing tales of kids with uncommon circumstances, discovering each solace and discomfort of their public disclosures (embedded.substack).
   • She additionally explored the Free Beginning Society, a subculture advocating unassisted births, which she critiques as a storytelling mission that rejects medical intervention however ignores dangers, like her son’s want for instant post-birth care (Marie Claire). The web’s mixture of conspiracy, fable, and commerce usually amplified her fears moderately than assuaging them (Bookshop.org).
4. Focused Promoting and Consumerism:
   • Upon discovering her being pregnant, Hess was inundated with focused advertisements for child merchandise, noting, “Extra manufacturers knew about my being pregnant than individuals did. All of them known as me mama” (MIT Know-how Evaluation). This “techno-corporate infrastructure” recalibrated algorithms to flood her with branded newsletters and product suggestions, from luxurious maternity vogue to robotic bassinets just like the $1,600 Snoo (Golden Hour Books, The Atlantic).
   • These advertisements create a way of companionship however prioritize commerce over real assist, promoting the phantasm of management via devices just like the Nanit monitor or Owlet sensor (The Atlantic).

Crucial Insights and Moral Issues

Hess’s narrative weaves private vulnerability with cultural critique, figuring out a number of troubling tendencies:

• Eugenics and Surveillance: She uncovers how prenatal applied sciences recycle American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism. The push for “optimized” offspring, seen in biotech startups providing genetic screening, echoes historic biases that marginalize incapacity (The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly). Her son’s situation challenged her to rethink “normalcy,” recognizing incapacity as a pure a part of human variation (The Lower).
• Digital Dependence: Regardless of warnings to not Google her son’s analysis, Hess dove into on-line boards, reflecting a broader reliance on the web for solutions. She argues that acknowledging this dependence is essential to countering expertise’s excesses, moderately than romanticizing an unmediated previous (The New Republic).
• Isolation and Atomization: The web’s “atomized” actuality—evident in fragmented communities like tradwife TikToks or anti-natalist Reddit threads—replaces shared knowledge with algorithm-driven noise, leaving dad and mom remoted (The New Republic, Mom Jones). Hess’s 2020 being pregnant, throughout COVID-19, amplified this, as social media grew to become her main neighborhood (Publishers Weekly).
• Management vs. Actuality: Parenting applied sciences promise management, however Hess asserts that “parenting just isn’t a programming language” (The New Yorker). The unpredictability of her son’s situation underscored that no app or gadget can absolutely put together dad and mom for the realities of childbirth (The Atlantic).

Private Journey and Broader Implications

Hess’s memoir just isn’t a information however a mirrored image, eschewing prescriptive recommendation for a “wry tour” of digital parenting (The Atlantic). Her son’s analysis led her to specialists who mitigated dangers, granting her “authority over my very own being pregnant” (The New Republic). But, she stays ambivalent about expertise’s position, valuing its insights whereas cautious of its manipulative pull. Her second being pregnant in 2022, much less medically complicated, additional formed her perspective, highlighting the common pressure between expertise’s guarantees and parenting’s unpredictability (MIT Know-how Evaluation).

In a post-Dobbs, pro-natalist local weather, Hess’s work resonates as a critique of how being pregnant is scrutinized and commodified. She connects her expertise to broader points—like restrictive abortion legal guidelines and biotech’s push for “excellent” infants—warning of a “techno-dystopian” future the place surveillance overshadows autonomy (The New Yorker). Her humor and humility, praised by reviewers like Vulture and Kirkus, make Second Life a compelling lens on how expertise reshapes one among life’s most private journeys (Kirkus Evaluations).

Public Sentiment

Posts on X replicate enthusiasm for Hess’s memoir, with @BiographyBoooks saying its launch on Might 6 and seven, 2025, and @CandiceRose praising its exploration of reproductive expertise (The New Yorker). @KMUW highlighted Hess’s NPR dialogue on navigating digital parenting, underscoring the ebook’s cultural relevance (KMUW).

Sources: The New Republic, The New Yorker, MIT Know-how Evaluation, The Atlantic, Mom Jones, The Lower, Publishers Weekly, Marie Claire, embedded.substack, Bookshop.org, Golden Hour Books, Kirkus Evaluations, posts on X