Trigger warning: This post discusses miscarriage, abortion, and child death.
Pregnancy apps were made for me. I logged my periods, tracked my ovulation, and catalogued my pregnancy symptoms until labor began. Voila! A baby!
But my experience was quite lucky and increasingly less common. Pregnancy apps were not made for most people. People who have spent years trying to get and stay pregnant. People who have spent almost as much time recovering from a miscarriage as they have actually being pregnant. People who have ended a very desired pregnancy because of medical conditions for the parent, the fetus, or the baby. People who have given birth to a gorgeous child who didn’t make it. I write this plea on behalf of my friends and family who haven't had luck on their side in this arena.
Pregnancy apps can do better for those who have experienced miscarriages, terminations, and child death.
First, pregnancy apps should offer the option to remove the ubiquitous “floating fetus” imagery. Even one of the pregnancy apps that touts features for parents who have experienced loss uses the floating fetus as their app logo. These images that update weekly can be exciting or educational for many people, especially those pregnant for the first time. But for those who have experienced miscarriage or termination, the images of what your previous fetus looked like when their potential for life ended can be extremely triggering as these future parents go about logging their subsequent pregnancies.
Second, pregnancy apps should provide a feature to mark that a pregnancy has ended without assuming that it ended in a live birth. For example, if a user tries to log a new pregnancy after a loss, many pregnancy apps will assume the previous pregnancy produced a child. That is not always the case. Someone recovering from a pregnancy loss would be so filled with hope as they open their app to log their new pregnancy, only to find it prompting them to name their child from the lost pregnancy in the app.
If a user logs a pregnancy loss, apps can offer symptom trackers unique to what people may experience after natural or medical pregnancy terminations. Pregnancy apps can also provide educational content related to pregnancy after loss or even community support, like a “due date” group. And if a user is new to the app, and they say they’ve been pregnant before, apps should not assume that pregnancy resulted in a live birth or that that child is living today.
Finally, and most importantly, if pregnancy apps do begin to support these types of pregnant people, they must take a significant step toward true privacy unprecedented in this industry, especially in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade. This could include storing data locally, encrypting backups that only devices (not servers) can decrypt, and not sharing data with advertisers or certain data tracking services. This may mean changing financial strategies away from advertising models that rely on non-anonymous data. One pregnancy app now offers an “anonymous mode,” but this still isn’t the app’s default mode, and the company does not have a great track record of valuing privacy.
In software design, our teams often decide to narrow the scope of our initial design phases to what we call the “happy path,” or the steps an app user would take if they experienced no errors, no edge cases. Pregnancy in reality is rarely a 100% “happy path” experience, so the apps that support that process should be prepared with the variety of paths, however many unhappy turns it takes, to best serve their user base.
A few citations:
1 / https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globally-affected-by-infertility
2 / https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
4 / Photo is of our son’s feet by photographer Stacie McChesney
