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The Exclusionary Language of Pregnancy Apps
Apps that help you track your pregnancy and figure out who to call when baby coughs are helpful, but what happens when you’re a parent who isn’t represented?
I’m not yet a parent, but I am incubating a little one. I’ve noticed that with most folks, when I mention I’m expecting, the first question out of their mouths is, “are you having a girl or a boy?”
I recently crossed the threshold into my second trimester. My partner and I decided we would find out the sex of the baby so that we can prepare ourselves to help them navigate the roles society will inevitably assign to them. But we don’t plan on telling anyone the sex until the baby is here, and we’re finding it’s a delicate stance to take in this heteronormative, binary world.
Since this is my first child, I did what any extremely online person does when they’re in search of information and community: I went looking for an app. Despite the breadth of offerings available for iPhone and Android, it’s slim pickings out there for a mother to be. The Google Play Store, in particular, is rife with pregnancy tracking and parenting advice apps, but I found the content of each almost suffocating with rhetoric around binary gender.
Take the Ovia tracking app, for example, which I’m using as a daily log for my pregnancy. Its features are robust, with the ability to track essential data like how much water I’m drinking and whether I’ve taken my prenatal vitamins. The articles featured in the app are adequately cited, and are either written by medical professionals, or come straight from the archives of the Mayo Clinic.
Every week, I check into Ovia to learn how much my baby has grown. Ovia’s word choice is cheeky, comparing the size of the baby to everyday objects like gaming consoles and fruit. But the descriptions about my baby remain explicitly gendered. “Your baby is busy practicing being cute by sucking her thumb,” reads the daily summary. “When your baby is resting, she is recharging her batteries,” reads another.
These apps’ forums contain just as much heteronormative discourse. “Did you girls have cramping?” asks one anonymous user in the Ovia baby app. It’s a fair…
