The Womb and the Web

Isabel Davis considers Amanda Hess’s new book about bringing a baby into a world of smart technology and data harvesting.

By Isabel DavisDecember 23, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Gender & Sexuality

“I HATED THE AD and I wanted the dress,” writes Amanda Hess in Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, her brilliant new account of coming to parenthood in a digital world. Recently, there has been widespread, continued interest in the politics of motherhood and pregnancy, but Hess has brought us something different: a memoir of how reproductive and family lives shape and are shaped by algorithms, smart tech, and linked apps. The book is grounded in Hess’s own experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenting, and it covers a lot of ground, including fertility and pregnancy trackers, Instagram motherhood, and baby-care gadgets. The texture of the book is neither paean nor polemic; instead, Hess crafts an acutely observed narrative of the parallel and intertwined flows of life on- and offline: “Sometimes as I rocked [my baby], my smartwatch blinked at me, asking if I wanted to record an elliptical workout.”

Hess changes her children’s names in Second Life, calling her first son Alma because an algorithm derives the name from her jokey Instagram exchanges. Because of his needs (he has Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome), Alma’s technological world is a mixture of necessary medical equipment and the gear that Hess’s friends cast off in the endless circulation of stuff. After Alma is released from the hospital, he is introduced to the Snoo, a “robocrib” linked to an app that is programmed to respond to a baby’s movements and cries. Once Alma is snuggled into it, the Snoo also provides an easy visualization of his sleep patterns and moods, with colors and status descriptors: “Alma is calm,” “Snoo is soothing Alma,” “Alma needs your care.”

The Snoo seems like a contraption from science fiction—almost like Philip K. Dick’s imagined Penfield Mood Organ—and yet throughout Hess’s book, there is the steady drumbeat of history. Biological data has always flowed, been collected, been given or taken. Menstrual cycles have always been charted and those charts passed over to interested parties—scientists, physicians, husbands. Hess describes how, during medical discussions of Alma’s condition, the historical concepts of the “maternal imagination” and “maternal impression” “still bubbled under the surface” of the rational explanations supplied by “genetics and teratogens.” Hess’s research into Alma’s condition also sends her into the past, through examples from 1970s Jamaica to an early 19th-century remedy. Eventually, she finds herself examining (the digital surrogates of) some stone tablets in the British Museum from 650 BC: “I searched all the way back to the ancient world, and there was my baby.” Paradoxically, the most high-tech interfaces reveal our own moment as an extension of history, one which, like any other, is a complex mixture of science, pseudoscience, folklore, and belief. We only have to turn on the internet to get a sight of this thoroughly historical and hypermodern hybridity.

I remember the first day I surfed the internet, sometime around 1994. I took my university log-in credentials to one of the sweaty rooms where students plugged into the supplied hardware and navigated uncertainly to the browser. Is this it? I thought. It did not feel like surfing. I didn’t know any URL addresses; there were no search engines. Nothing seemed to be lifting me up or carrying me along as if I were on a wave. Yet now, like most others, exhaustingly, I am hooked up to the internet 24-7. Surf’s up.

At that mid-1990s juncture, the intimacy with which we are now entangled with the internet, its gamification of embodied life, was unimaginable to many of us. Who else foresaw how app users’ maintenance of streaks, XP, and stats would generate so much biomedical data? Menstrual blood, DNA, feelings, and sex acts are all data, not just for consenting subjects of experimental medical research programs but for all. Because of their son’s special condition, Hess and her partner agree that they “ought” to enroll him into a research study, consenting to the collection of his genetic material for a biorepository. They solemnly sign and initial the forms in longhand, selecting what information researchers can and cannot publish. Meanwhile, rich seams of data are being collectively deposited into cyber-storage willy-nilly. Accept privacy terms? Click.

Hess’s decision to rename her sons in her book holds something back. It is a refusal of total surrender to virtual living, but even this gesture is largely meaningless. Even if someone chooses to deinstall or not install an app, everyone else’s data conjures up the conscientious objector anyway and either markets stuff to them or criminalizes them regardless. Despite the historicity of data collection, its scale and reach are new. This great data hemorrhage makes experimental subjects of us all in an inexplicit mass observation project.

What do app and social media users get back? The answers are many, according to Hess’s book: knowledge, community, advice, reassurance. Hess never sneers at how others use the internet because she is herself in it, finding solace, for example, in the diarized lives of other “medical moms” on Instagram, recognizing that their content is changing social perceptions and funding necessary medical care. She also movingly explores the postnatal cyber-extension of the maternal-fetal entanglement so that “on the internet, it could seem that Alma was me, that I was him.” And where a child’s needs push parents like Hess into medical advocacy, there is also a curious identification with the condition itself. The universal struggle for identity coherence in early motherhood gathers an uncanny digital form.

Data, and specifically the data generated by fem tech, is, of course, a hot topic, and under extensive contemporary review. Hess, a journalist specializing in digital culture, offers new contours to otherwise familiar debates. On the high-profile question of the forensic use of such data, Hess notes that no one has yet been prosecuted for seeking a termination after referral from an app—that most cases emerge from the sharing of patient histories by medical practitioners. Instead, she places more emphasis on technologies’ social and aesthetic influence: for example, the weight they lend to the fetus in the cultural imagination. “Prenatal clumps and clods,” she writes, are imagined by the app as “gurgling tots,” as if every conception infallibly becomes a baby. Hess focuses, too, on the makers and beneficiaries behind the tech. What are the values of each platform, who does it pay, and to whom does it on-sell? Are users’ care and empowerment primary motivations or a hook for sales? Why does it matter if a particular platform is designed by a feminist or a tech bro?

Considerable thought is given in Second Life to the anarchic community-building of virtual worlds. Hess describes digital spaces “where the app’s users converged into a thrumming pregnant unconscious,” a “community untouched by the sorting mechanisms that usually guided me toward people who were just like me,” one that cut across geographical, class, and religious affiliation. These platforms develop their own language—“baby dust to all”—presented as a slew of acronyms. One of Hess’s research methods is to return to forums from which she has ostensibly graduated: for example, she revisits the message board where users discuss their anxieties about prenatal screening, although she has had her baby and lived through exactly the sort of diagnosis that commenters most fear. She is driven both by professional curiosity and by the knowledge that experience brings. She tries to reassure her “former self”—really another forum contributor—that Alma “is amazing!” Yet here Hess reaches the limits of cyber community: “[W]hen I read my comment again, it looked canned and aggressive.” There is no way back to one’s old self and no solidarity in the wrong chat forum. Interlopers are neither heard nor answered.

Hess’s book strikes me as a counterpoint to poet Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This. Both books tell a story of the birth of a child with a condition physicians advise against googling, in the context of a life lived through a screen. While Lockwood writes in jump-cut sparkly fragments that even resemble a social media feed, Hess provides the sustained prose commentary that unfolds and examines ideas at more length. Both remind us that the antidote to the internet is the physical book, with which we still have a private relationship. The internet has unsorted and disarranged knowledge as well as people, and even though it has made medical science and other forms of knowledge more accessible than ever before, it has also mixed them up with all the other online noise. Books are our best chance of making sense of the information soup in our pockets.

The final section of Second Life finds Hess testing life beyond the web. On an assignment, she travels to a Matriarch Rising Festival, a multiday, women-only event that features exactly the kind of singing and workshops you might expect (incidentally, tickets cost $2,000 and toddlers are an extra $500). The experience produces a powerful counterpoint to what it follows. In some ways, this departure feels like a sidestep from the book’s technological concerns, and yet it shows that cyberspace is a mirror world: its relentless feeds, reportage from myriad lived lives. I won’t tell you how the festival assignment works out; it would spoil the book. Suffice to say that, as in the rest of the book, Hess’s motivations are unclear—professional, writerly research, or something more personal? This mixed drive gives the book its depth and breadth, clarity and commitment.

Hess writes not merely for “medical moms” but for anyone. Like most other babies, Alma is born, fed, burped, and settled to sleep in the light of the phone’s camera, watched and overheard by baby monitors. Hess necessarily writes from her own family’s particularity but gathers perspectives from other researchers, writers, and digital adventurers. Every reader will be able to cross-reference their different sense of how their unique virtual and physical existences collide and collude. Second Life gives us thoroughly fresh ways to think through the fact that virtual living is now compulsory and consuming, embedded in our intimate lives for both better and worse. Sometimes, it seems we can do little more than like, follow, share, or drop an emoji of our choice into the never-quiet chat.