Cultural critic and author Amanda Hess joins us to discuss her new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. We talk about the intersection of pregnancy, early parenthood, and technology, her experience using a popular period app to track her pregnancy, how she navigated self-blame and cultural stigma when her baby was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition, and more. Behind the paywall, we get into the pervasiveness of diet culture in pregnancy, the natural-childbirth movement and the role of crunchy wellness influencers in perpetuating myths about what birth should look like, how to challenge ableism and eugenic thinking about childhood disability, and more.
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Amanda Hess is a critic-at-large at the New York Times, where she writes about internet and pop culture. Her first book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, was published in 2025. She is a National Magazine Award winner who has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, ESPN the Magazine, Best American Sportswriting, Best American Magazine Writing, and Slate. Learn more about her work at amandahess.org.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Amanda’s book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
Amanda’s website
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Here is my conversation with Amanda Hess. I really loved your book which is called Second Life. It’s all about the intersection of pregnancy, early parenthood and technology. And I am currently pregnant with my second child.
Amanda Hess: Congratulations.
Christy Harrison: Thank you, thank you. It’s very exciting. It’s been a whole journey with IVF and all the stuff. But I was very interested to read it in this time when I’m also finding myself in these weird pregnancy forums and have no desire to be part of social media parenting, anything but find myself Googling about symptoms or things that are coming up, or just curious about what’s going on this week, what size is my baby and then finding myself in these very strange places where it’s people from around the world who are totally decontextualized. I have no idea who they are. Oftentimes these are posts from years and years ago, and they’re just kind of sitting there for someone to stumble on. It was interesting to see that mirrored in your book.
Amanda Hess: Yeah, all you know is that they’re pregnant or they say they’re pregnant.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, you don’t even know that, right? There could probably be some people posing as pregnant in these forums for whatever reason. Who knows what ended up happening with pregnancies. Ah, it’s just such an interesting thing. So I’m curious with everything that you went through in your pregnancies and especially your first pregnancy, when you were new to all of this and kind of stumbling into these things, what was your relationship with technology like then? And how has it changed throughout the course of the two pregnancies you had? And then writing this book.
Amanda Hess: I’ve been writing about technology and Internet culture for a long time. And so I had this relationship with it where I was looking into things for work. And so that gave me a kind of critical distance from anything that I was interacting with. It was very common for me to download a new app or to start getting into a new kind of Reddit community and look at it from this analytical place and figure out how I felt about it and what I thought about it and write it down and turn it into a product and then move on.
And then when I got pregnant, that critical distance that I had with technology completely collapsed. I had such an emotional relationship with all of the products that I was using and communities that I was monitoring and things that I was Googling that. It kind of snuck up on me and it really surprised me.
Christy Harrison: Tell me more about that. What was the emotional relationship like?
Amanda Hess: I think part of it was like, I’ve always gone to the Internet when I have a question. I’m just so trained to do that. And when I’m curious about something, I just look it up. And pregnancy was something that I had spent my whole life avoiding and avoiding thinking about or really didn’t know much about it other than the things that filter into popular culture about, like, not eating sushi or whatever. And also I was unprepared for how overwhelming it was in my body, how difficult it was for me to understand, to wrap my head around this incredible thing that there was a human growing inside of me, and also that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.
In the beginning, my husband knew that I was pregnant, but I didn’t see a doctor until I was eight weeks pregnant or something. And I didn’t tell friends and then colleagues for a much longer period of time. And so I was just really vulnerable to these new spaces that I was going into and apps that I was downloading in a way that I had not felt like since I was in middle school, since I was experiencing puberty or something.
Christy Harrison: It really is a vulnerable time. I think that that’s sort of a cliche that people talk about women being preyed on in pregnancy or postpartum in various ways. But until you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to realize how natural skepticism or learned skepticism about various things and technologies can kind of go out the window. I also am someone who is very skeptical of and critical of technology and information. I write a lot about wellness misinformation and try to dig into the science behind wellness trends and sort of see if there’s any there there and almost all the time I’m like, this is just bogus, you know? I have developed this very robust skepticism of any sort of wellness ideas that I come across and trends and things like that.
But when it comes to pregnancy, I’m, like, sitting there on these weird forums like Baby Center and Mom’s Net and all these random things that I’ve never looked at in my life, and just sort of taking in these people’s experiences or what they say are their experiences, right? And kind of filtering that through, like, oh, let me Google that. Let me see if there’s any research on this. Because I also went through IVF, and I had done IVF with my first daughter and had embryos frozen. And so I naively thought, like, oh, this will be an easy second round. We’ll just get pregnant right away and we’ll Be off to the races. And it took four tries this time. So after three tries, it’s considered like recurrent implantation failure. And so I’m like, what did I do?
Amanda Hess: Yeah, what did I do? What can I do? What can I buy? What can I try?
Christy Harrison: Exactly. And what have other people done and tried? What protocols? What am I missing? Here’s a protocol that my doctor recommended. Let me cross check this with these random people on the Internet. I certainly would pull myself out of that and be like, okay, let me go to PubMed and see what the research actually says. But not always. Those things would just get in my head and I would be down this path pretty far away as of imagining what was going to happen or thinking about these different things I was going to ask my doctor.
And then I would bring it up to her and she’s like, well, in this very kind, empathetic tone, no, no, we don’t do that and here’s why. And it’s just a very obvious reason. And it sort of would dispel those myths pretty quickly. I found myself really caught up in it as well. When anything goes wrong it becomes so tempting to turn to the Internet for solace.
Amanda Hess: Yes. Or just this sense of autonomy and control over the situation. I really found that especially, I think, because I was a critical person and critical about technology, literally my job to write criticism about technology, I was underappreciating the extent to which there’s a subconscious influence on absorbing all of this material. So on a rational level, I could see an image of a pregnant woman who had this idealized pregnant body and think, even that woman doesn’t look like that. I don’t even want to look like that. I think I have a more sympathetic attitude for myself, that I am absorbing those images even as I’m reading them, to reject them.
And the accumulation of that in pregnancy when I didn’t really know what was necessary and what wasn’t and where a lot of the things, like a lot of the kind of folky suggestions that you get on the Internet, like in and of themselves are often harmless. But just this feeling that I had given up control to the Internet or to an app, and I was sort of like allowing my pregnancy to be monitored by this shadowy external force. I think that did influence me. That was a habit that I acquired; checking in with my phone, as if my phone knew something about my body that I didn’t.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I resonate with that so much. I will find myself reaching for my phone, not even knowing what to put in because I don’t have social media anymore. I don’t scroll things, really but I am reaching for something and I’m like, what is it I’m looking for right now? What sort of reassurance, you know? And then I would find myself formulating a question like, oh, let me ask this. Let’s scratch that itch or whatever. But you write about using Flo, which is like the period tracker app that morphs into a pregnancy app, which I didn’t even realize. I hadn’t used use that. But you talk about how you turn on pregnancy mode, and it’s like this whole new interface and kind of takes you to a different place.
And at first you were using it to check in and just make sure everything was going well, or keeping tabs on your pregnancy from week to week. And seeing this image of a fetus that was supposed to be like the normative fetus that would represent your baby. But then you started to question it, and you had a lot go on in your pregnancy that we’ll talk about. But also you started to dig into the origin story of Flo, which I find really interesting. And you found some very startling things there. Can you talk about what you discovered and how it changed your relationship with that technology and maybe with tracking technology in general?
Amanda Hess: Yeah, I started using Flo just because I had heard many years ago that there was something called a period tracking app. And so I just searched the app store and I downloaded the first one that came up, and it’s the most popular one in the world and it’s called Flo, and I loved it as a period tracker. I had really intense PMS when I was getting my period. And I would always just lose track of when my period was going to come. And so I’d be, like, really sad and angry for one day before the blood would arrive. And then I’d be like, oh, that’s why I am feeling very angry and sad right now. And so just tracking it with Flo once a month was useful and that’s all I really needed to use it for.
But of course, from the perspective of an app developer, they don’t want an app that you’re going to open once a month. And for me, it was when I started to think about the idea of trying to get pregnant that I realized that there were these all other features in it that tell you when it thinks that you’re most fertile or least fertile. And that really shaped my imagination around my days. I became really aware of when it was possible for me to get pregnant and when my husband and I were deciding not to engage with that opportunity.
And then when I did become pregnant, the whole interface changes and it became something that I was checking, like 10 times a day, not because there were 10 new things to see in there, but just because I think there’s this way in which I use my phone where it’s like, if I have an impulse, which I think is partly phone addiction, and partly the impulse to communicate with other people or to say something or to hear something, I’ll go to some social media website. And for me, at that time, I was just thinking about pregnancy all the time and I wanted something that was on that level and that was providing me feedback.
And so Flo, in addition to having this kind of CGI fetus floating around that’s supposed to represent what your baby looks like at a certain time, has this interface called secret chats. Anonymous people around the world who are all at the same pregnancy stage you are, or who were three months ago, but now you’re reading their comments. And I became really interested in just hanging out in this asynchronous, anonymous pregnancy space. And it was only later that I was like, hey, I wonder who made Flo? I am assuming a woman. I assumed wrong. Flo was created by two cisgender men, so men who don’t menstruate.
Their origin story that’s now been deleted from the website was that it was first started by men who wanted to understand their wives and girlfriends better and so to know when they were going to get their periods. It’s so gross that I don’t really buy it. I think Flo was created because they saw a market opportunity. And these are people who had created other apps that were around dieting, weight loss, exercise. So they intuited that there was a new thing that they could monitor. And they were not the first ones to come up with this idea.
And from there, that was really the first time that I was like, I wonder what about this app is engineered not to keep me company while I’m pregnant or to give me information, but to increase engagement, to get me to sign up for the premium, or to keep me going back and back and back to the app so I see the ads or whatever. And typically that thought for me comes a lot earlier in my use of an app. But it was really like months and months into it, that’s how I started to change my feelings about it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, I can understand that. Because wanting that comfort and that sense of like checking in on something or having some benchmark against. There’s so many weird symptoms in early pregnancy and I feel like it’s just nice to have something to be like, is this normal? Is this okay? Okay. I think so, right? Yeah, we’re good. And especially when, I mean, I’ve had only IVF pregnancies, which are invasive and have a lot of stuff that is hard about them, but in one way I think they’re easier, which is that you’re monitored from the get go so you know the exact moment of conception and then you’re monitored like every week or sometimes multiple times a week, you know, from there to when you graduate the IVF clinic, which is like around eight weeks, and then you go to a regular OB.
And that’s usually the time when people who got pregnant the old fashioned way are just starting to get monitored and to get any sort of anything beyond the early test. And I’ve already had like six ultrasounds or something like that. Yeah, I can see that desire and I still had also the desire to go to my phone and get some kind of reassurance or whatever. There’s just so much uncertainty in early pregnancy.
Amanda Hess: Yeah. And I definitely felt like by the time that I learned that I was pregnant, having already been pregnant for a few weeks and then not being able to see a doctor for a few more weeks, I felt like I was behind and I needed to catch up and that maybe I had already made some mistakes, like things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, like have a glass of wine or something. And so I was starting from this deficit of confidence that immediately when I went to log the pregnancy in Flo and they were like, do you want to activate pregnancy mode if you’re pregnant? And I was like, oh, I didn’t know that that was a thing. But it was really the first resource that I was confronted with after I learned that I was pregnant.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and related to feeling like you were behind or like there might have been something you did, it sounds like later on in your pregnancy you were made to feel like you did things wrong. You write about taking an anxiety medication that you had been on for a long time that your doctor said was fine in pregnancy and then hearing maybe you shouldn’t have taken it. And the feeling of like, oh, my God, what did I do?
Amanda Hess: Yeah. So when I was seven months pregnant, I had what I thought was going to be a routine ultrasound that ended up not being routine. I was laying there on the table and anyone who has been pregnant or had an ultrasound in the United States knows that the technician is not giving you medical information, typically. The exam was lasting a very long time. And her really kind of like, nice baby small talk had turned to silence. And she kept going out of the room and conferring with the doctor and coming back. And so this is something that I had always worried about happening in the middle of my ultrasound. I was familiar with it as something I imagined, but now it was happening.
And my first thought was, I wish I had my phone. I wish I had my phone so I could look up the parts of my baby’s body that I could see that she was looking at on the screen and try to understand what could be happening. Just this feeling that I think I had trained myself to feel that if I had information about what was going on, then I would have some kind of control, even though there was nothing in my phone that could really tell me what was going on exactly with my pregnancy.
The doctor told me that he suspected that my son might have an overgrowth disorder called Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome, which he was right. But I only learned that four weeks later after a long series of tests. And during that diagnostic period, there were other doctors who suggested to me that there was a catastrophic problem with my son’s brain. I had a fetal MRI. I had an amniocentesis at seven months and many genetic tests that were all grown from my fetal cells in the lab or whatever.
And so that was, for me, a month being pregnant as like a year in non-pregnancy. It’s just such a long time to be in that body and then to just not know what was going on, not know if I was going to have a child. What he would be like it was a really vulnerable time. And this ended up being so good. It was the point when I realized that all of the kind of online digital pregnancy information and marketing had been directed at this broad and bland idea of a normal pregnancy for a typical woman. But of course nobody has a normal pregnancy. No person is normal or completely typical. And that’s a good thing. And the idea that’s promoted about what is normal is also influenced by ableism, racism, sexism, all of this stuff.
I’m someone who, as a white able bodied woman, I was not super attuned to how stigmatizing some of this imagery was and information was because I was so centered in the pregnancy Internet, like it’s created for a white woman like me who maybe has like a little bit of extra money, at least before my actual kids arrived, that I could spend on them or on the idea of them, who has really advanced medical access.
And it was only when I saw in the ultrasound that there was something different about my son that I remember I opened Flo for the first time after that and I saw the CGI fetus and it was the first time that I realized that’s not a picture of my baby. It can’t see inside me. I knew that rationally, but I don’t think I knew that emotionally. There was some emotional level where I was like, I’m looking at a representation of my baby when I’m opening my phone. And it was only then that I realized that’s not my baby. This app doesn’t know anything about me other than the expected due date that I typed in there.
Amanda Hess: It was good for me to realize that all of this stuff is based on enforcing of normal. That my life now is going to take me away from in a good way and force me to reject and grapple with and deal with in all these ways. For the four weeks before my son was actually diagnosed, it was completely hellish. But ultimately that was the seed of me understanding that all of this stuff had been created for a vision of the ideal pregnant woman that I think is very destructive. And the ideal baby that I think is really destructive and this idea that the ideal pregnant woman who comports herself in the ideal way can create the optimal baby or whatever.
Christy Harrison: Right. Because there’s a lot of self blame. It sounds like there was for you anyway, like the initial scan and then starting to figure out what it was and getting all these different tests done, you were racking your brain to figure out, what did I do to create this or what, what mistake did I make? And that is so, I think, imposed on us by the culture. And it’s so normalized by the healthcare system. And it sounds like some of your doctors even suggested that there was something you had done to cause it or something like that. Especially when you’re following this potential brain issue, that ended up not being right, that that was a site of a lot of mom blaming.
Amanda Hess: Yeah. The big thing was that my son had a very large tongue, so it was protruding from his mouth persistently on the ultrasound, which at first I thought was very cute, and then I realized was unusual and was potentially a sign of a genetic condition, I again think is very cute. But I had to go through a long journey to get back there. And so they didn’t know if it was genetic in cause or if it was environmental and so it meant that there was this kind of medical investigation into what I had done during my pregnancy, like what prescription medications I had taken, if I had had anything to drink and when.
After going through this and writing this book, I know so many women who have taken psychiatric medications throughout pregnancy, and it was completely endorsed by their doctors and it was totally fine. But because there was this question, they had to really look into everything. And I should say here, there are women who take drugs during pregnancy, even prescription drugs, who are not just medically investigated, but criminally investigated, where a doctor or a nurse will tip off the authorities if they find something, a marker in their blood or their urine.
Christy Harrison: And sometimes they’re tested for that without their consent, right?
Amanda Hess: Yeah. And so that’s not what happened to me, but it was something that affected me really deeply because it created this association in my mind, even when it was discovered that there was a genetic cause for this, that I had done something or been something, I felt very deeply within me that there was something wrong with me, and that’s why this was happening. And that’s an idea that’s so unfair to me. It’s so stigmatizing to my son. But I didn’t know that at the time. At the time, all I knew was I had this almost religious feeling, it wasn’t even necessarily biological, but that I was being punished for doing something wrong for not being ready to be a mother.
I now know that nobody’s ready to be a parent until they are a parent but at the time, all of these messages that I thought I had kind of escaped just by having really cool parents who never expected that I had kids or sort of treated me like a pre-mother as a girl. I just hadn’t realized how much I had absorbed this idea that, there is an ideology, especially in this country, that childbirth pregnancy is like the peak feminine achievement and it’s this bodily achievement that you have to prepare for, and really, sacrifice yourself for and I felt fundamentally like I had not done that.
And I think on just this even subconscious level, all of that was coming out now, all of the body stuff that I had ever absorbed was coming out during pregnancy. And for me, it felt like it was going to come out in the form of my child. And so I just wanted to be a ready person. I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be like a prepared mom before I created that child.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I can very much relate to that. And I think so many of us absorb those cultural messages without even knowing it. Like you said in the book, there’s a lot of people who are sort of raised to be pre-moms. Right? Raised in these sort of traditional societies where girls are expected to become moms and they’re kind of like trained for it and made to want it and all of that from a really young age. And I mean, I did not grow up in a culture like that either and was also not pressured to become a parent or anything like that. But I think there definitely still is this traditional conception of what a “good mom” is and what one should do that we just absorb by dint of living this culture.
I think especially there’s this diet and wellness culture piece that I would love to dig into, which is something that you touch on in the book and a line that I just was like, yes, this feels so accurate: You write, “Once I had thought of pregnancy as a time when you were allowed to eat whatever you wanted. But now I could see that it was the Tour de France of restrictive eating. Strict diet and exercise during pregnancy were cast not just as aesthetic practices, but moral achievements conflated with the health of the pregnancy and the expression of superior mothering.”
I really feel that so strongly, not just for myself, but for my clients, because I’m also a dietitian. I see clients with disordered eating and eating disorders. And I think there’s just so much pressure on pregnant people to be this perfect vessel and put the most pure things into your body and be vigilant at all times about what passes your lips and to exercise in this perfect way. And there’s just so much diet culture around pregnancy.
And that’s not even to mention the weight gain stuff and all of the sort of pressure to not gain weight and the weight checks and talks from your doctor about what’s happening week to week and why did you gain this much or whatever. Can you talk about your experience with that? Did you have these kinds of pressures or experience these kinds of pressures in pregnancy? And do you feel like that intersected at all with these questions about what was going on with your son and his diagnosis and what could I have done or something?
Amanda Hess: I mean, I definitely had this feeling as I became pregnant that it was important for me to hold onto myself and to reappear as myself after I gave birth. And so for me, that meant
