International Perspectives – Pregnancy apps and the digital child before birth

Content warning – This International Perspective blog post mentions miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and stillbirth.

There are currently hundreds of pregnancy apps available, with millions of users across the world. These apps are downloadable for free or for a fee, and they encourage their users to track pregnancies over time by providing information that matches each stage. 

After entering an estimated date of delivery – or due date – the app will offer weekly or even daily notifications that inform the user about embryonic and foetal development, the physical changes taking place in the pregnant body, activities to undertake at different stages of pregnancy, and how to prepare for future birth and life with a baby. 

Weekly developmental milestones are ordered along a timeline that corresponds to the app user’s own pregnancy. This is key to the translation of standard health information into personalised content about the app user’s own body and baby. 

Since I started researching pregnancy apps in 2014, these tools have become more and more deeply embedded in the everyday digital lives of expectant parents. People’s use of pregnancy apps is emotional, social and practical: these apps not only shape how individuals experience their pregnancy, but they also shape much broader ideas about family, parenthood, care and responsibility (maternal responsibility especially, which I will come back to). 

Here, I explore how we might think about the digital child before birth and through the lens of pregnancy apps.

Bonding through imagery

Pregnancy apps can offer reassurance, companionship and a means to bond with the unborn baby, especially during first-time pregnancies. The apps help expectant parents and other family relations – including expectant grandparents – to prepare for the future baby and to imagine themselves in their new family roles. 

Apps also invite users to imagine the foetus or (future) baby through prenatal imagery. One of the most noticeable features of many popular apps is the mass of digital images. Providing users with beautiful visuals is central to the apps’ appeal and indeed their marketing too. 

Pregnancy apps draw on a range of different visual styles to show how the foetus grows and develops over the course of an average pregnancy. Ultrasound images exist alongside digitally produced artistic impressions of embryos, foetuses and the body interior. Other imagery comes from the app users themselves who might, for example, share ultrasound scans with their apps as a record of the baby’s “first picture”. This sharing also marks the beginning of their digital footprint. 

Pregnancy apps have been visually innovative. They popularised fruit and vegetable size comparisons as a playful way of imagining foetal growth. But through their emphasis on foetal weight and size, these apps invite – or nudge – their users to start rehearsing the kinds of tracking and monitoring that will be expected of them as parents. 

Following the estimated growth of the foetus across pregnancy mirrors the kind of weight monitoring that is central to infant- and child-care. In this way, while apps focus intensively on the timeline of pregnancy, they are an early display of datafied parenting behaviours. 

The commercialisation of pre-motherhood

The preparation for parenthood during pregnancy is often framed in terms of improving the health of the prospective parent(s) and future child, but it is also highly commercialised. Becoming informed about pregnancy and parenting is closely tied to becoming a “savvy” consumer, where people are expected to evaluate and make the “right” choices for their families. 

In other words, there is a close relationship between the images of a good consumer and a good parent.

Many of the apps have advertising built into their content. The personal data that users share with their apps is valuable to app developers and companies: it can be used to target ads, sell products, or develop new services. Users of apps are often very aware of how apps blur the line between care and commerce. 

Apps draw people’s reproductive lives into a digital economy of pre-motherhood. I emphasise motherhood here, because this labour is heavily gendered. Apps reflect a much broader culture where mothers are assumed to have the primary responsibility for family health and household shopping. Shop or brand loyalty programmes have a long history of targeting mothers as the point of contact for a whole family. 

So, while the apps help users feel supported and more connected to the developing baby, they also tie them to a network of medical advice, commercial advertising and normative expectations about what “good parenting” looks like. Apps can never exist in isolation from these broader social and cultural contexts.

A problem with apps and anticipation

As a final note, thinking through pregnancy apps demands that we also recognise the pregnancies that do not “fit” the template of “normal” pregnancy development that apps are built around. In other words, pregnancies that do not follow a steady trajectory towards a healthy birth.

We know that experiences of pregnancy are diverse. We also know that not all pregnancies end with a living child: some pregnancies end in miscarriage, loss or stillbirth. This is a concern that users of pregnancy apps continuously have to grapple with. The apps invite users to imagine and emotionally “invest” in a future child from the very earliest stages of pregnancy, and to engage in an immersive consumer culture of pre-motherhood. But at the same time, the medicalised information culture of pregnancy heightens an awareness of pregnancy loss. 

The risks of not being able to delete the digital traces of a pregnancy or hoped-for baby are well documented, including the potential hurt caused by continuing to receive automated notifications, milestones or app-generated messages after a pregnancy has ended. This is why many pregnant people will hold off downloading an app until later in their pregnancy, such as after their first ultrasound scan or when the risk of miscarriage is statistically lower. 

This is of course not only a problem with apps but digital life more broadly. Targeted ads in social media or internet browsing, for instance, are known for being insensitive to the diversity and complexity of reproductive experience. As we consider the role of apps and other digital devices, it is important to think about how they might better support different kinds of pregnancy experience, including those shaped by loss.

*Note on terms: I recognise the politics and morally loaded language of reproduction. In this text, I have chosen to blend terms to describe the foetus, unborn baby and future child. This is to recognise the range of terms used – often interchangeably – by research participants.