Second Life

Second Life: Having a child in the digital age
By Amanda Hess (2025)

This was an interview with the author on Fresh Air, May 7, 2025.  These are my notes from the podcast.

This book addresses how technology has changed having a baby. It takes to control our relationship to our own health, our children, etc.
Blame and guilt are baked into the medical system.
With regularity, patients encounter pseudoscience on the Internet. Every weirdness is out there.

Hess describes a website, Flow, that purports to help women through gestation. It has hundreds of millions of users and yet it provides mis- and disinformation.

What spurred her to write her book was that in the early third trimester of her first pregnancy her baby was diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann  syndrome.

She discovered that disability can be divorced from the human side. Her experiences give insight into the patient’s mind. The Internet preys on vulnerable people. It creates a context for patient expectations.

Our culture highly stigmatizes disability. Questions are raised about the ethics and business of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD).
See the book Mercies in Disguise by Gina Kolata
There are aspects of eugenics in all of this.

Today, for those who can afford it, their babies are always being monitored by machines, such as the the “robotic crib” — Snoo Bassinet (discount price ~ $1200 and up).  Surveillance is now confused with care. There is an intrusive element to all of this.  For sure there are some positive features, but the negatives may outweigh them.

Hess sees Internet parent groups as a positive feature of the web.

Technology is not being developed for the betterment of mankind; it is being developed to drive profits for individuals and companies.

This book explores how the digital age impacts on pregnancy and child rearing. It’s an introduction to thinking about how the Internet impacts all aspects of our lives and health.

Twiblings: Annals of Surrogacy

Meet the Twiblings is an article about how four women (and one man) conspired to make two babies born five days apart. Melanie Thernstrom weaves a moving story about the frontiers of reproduction she explored and utilized to have her children.

It will be simpler for her to tell the "twiblings:"
"Once, there was a couple who wanted to have babies. They tried and tried, but no babies arrived, and they were very sad. But then a Fairy Goddonor brought them some magical eggs. She came from a place where it never rains, and she drove a midnight blue convertible and had long golden hair (well, currently short and aubergine). They took the eggs, and the eggs changed into the beginnings of babies, and they gave them to angel women to help them grow. So the angel women stowed the beginning of each baby in their bodies, where they grew and grew like pumpkins."

Lost Lullaby: Deborah Alecson 1995

By Deborah Golden Alecson
Published by University of California Press, 1995
ISBN 0520088700, 9780520088702 207 pages

From Google Books. "Lost Lullaby makes one think the unthinkable: how a loving parent can pray for the death of her child. It is Deborah Alecson's story of her daughter, Andrea, who was born after a full-term, uneventful pregnancy, weighing 7 pounds 11 ounces, perfectly formed and exquisitely featured. But an inexplicable accident at birth left her with massive and irreversible brain damage.
Told in a mother's voice, with a simplicity and directness that heighten the intensity of the drama that unfolds, Lost Lullaby reaffirms the human dimension of what is too often an abstract and purely theoretical discussion. During the two months that Andrea spent in the Neonatal ICU, Ms. Alecson spoke with lawyers, doctors, and ethicists in an effort to understand the legal, medical and ethical implications of her plight. She recounts those discussions and describes legal cases that have a direct bearing on her own situation. Her battle--both in coming to the agonizing decision to let her child die and in convincing the medical and legal establishments to respect that decision--will engender empathy for the plight of many families, and an awareness of the need to use medical technology with restraint. It is a must-read for everyone who cares about how we make life-and-death decisions on these new medical, legal, and moral frontiers."
This is an important book -- a must read. It is difficult and painful because it looks at issues that are usually glossed over. Can be obtained from abebooks.com DJE

Growing Up Fast by Joanna Lipper

This is an important and moving book. From Ms. Lipper's web site: "Growing Up Fast tells the life stories of six teen mothers from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city in Berkshire County that was until the late 1980's, a manufacturing base for the General Electric Company. It documents the lives of these teenagers, their families and members of the community, as they witness factory closings and the transformation of their hometown under the strain of economic and social upheaval and the influx of drugs."

This is also a DVD.