Smart Pregnancies or Reproductive Control? Quantifying Pregnancy Experiences in the Era of Direct-to-Consumer Apps

Pregnancy applications dominate the worldwide direct-to-consumer market. Enthusiasts claim that these platforms can promote women’s reproductive control by allowing users to bypass traditional routes for accessing real-time health information and empowering women to seek professional attention (only) when necessary, thereby maintaining pregnant women’s well-being while preventing superfluous visits that may add stress to users and the healthcare system.

Illustrated by various examples, this presentation critically explores how these emerging technologies may ironically compromise not only women’s reproductive autonomy and well-being, but also impose additional burdens on the health system. In particular, I argue that DTC apps may exert further power and control over pregnant women. These technologies medicalize and pathologize women’s bodies as sources of worry that require constant surveillance and evaluation. The increasing expectation to use these apps is turning women’s intimate embodied pregnancy experiences into quantified and commercialized data, instructions for self-discipline, and care work. Such techno-medicalization intersects with social and professional messages that continuously monitoring one’s pregnancy is simply the rational and responsible thing for women to do to prevent prenatal impairment. Against the backdrop of gendered and ableist societies where women have been socialized to actively monitor, discipline, and modify their bodies as per various social ideals, pregnancy monitoring apps that continuously collect and analyze maternal-fetal information regardless of clinical utility may further exploit women’s fear and disempower women, perpetuating a sex-gender system that configures women’s wombs as special biological and social problems, and further burdening health systems.