Smartphones are increasingly entangled with the most intimate areas of everyday life, providing possibilities for the continued expansion of digital self-tracking technologies. Within this context, the development of smartphone applications targeted at female reproductive health are offering novel forms and practices of knowledge production about reproductive bodies and processes. This article presents empirical research from the United Kingdom on women’s use of fertility tracking applications, known more generally as fertility apps, while trying to conceive. Drawing on material from interviews with women who had experience of using fertility apps, I demonstrate the significance of this particular form of fertility tracking for the embodied shift from pregnancy prevention to actively facilitating pregnancy, participants’ sense of self and identity and how they perceived the reproductive potentiality of their bodies. I argue that fertility apps are significantly involved in making fertility cycles known and thus configuring the pre-pregnant reproductive body.
The proliferation and popularity of additional treatments in IVF, also known as add-ons, has generated widespread discussion and controversy in the UK, where concerns have addressed the lack of evidence to support the efficacy and safety of these treatments, their cost, and their connection to a wider context of privatisation of fertility treatment. Drawing on 42 interviews with IVF patients, this article explores the role of hope in the appeal of add-ons from the patient perspective. The analysis is presented in two parts: firstly, we investigate the role of hope in patients’ decision-making on treatment, contextualising add-ons in the broader trajectory of their IVF experience; secondly, we examine how patients navigate the offer of add-ons, focusing on the role of hope in how they rationalise their decisions on whether to include them in their fertility treatment. Our analysis shows how patients craft their hope to navigate the increasing number of available options in their quest to find the treatment(s) that will “work” for them. We suggest that the imperative for patients to explore all options is intensified with the emergence of add-ons, which produces a novel context and version of a “hope technology”.
With the increasing offer of fertility treatment by a largely privatised sector, which has involved the proliferation of treatment add-ons lacking evidence of effectiveness, In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) patients are expected to make informed choices on what to include in their treatment. Drawing on interviews with 51 individuals undergoing fertility treatment, this article explores patients' approaches to medical evidence interpretation and its role in their decisions to include add-ons. While most IVF patients share understandings of what counts as medical evidence, our findings show how their approaches also differ. Our analysis focuses on how patients negotiate the notion of medical evidence and its relation to other forms of experience or knowledge. We present four different approaches to evidence in IVF: (1) delegating evaluations of evidence to experts;(2) critically assessing available evidence; (3) acknowledging the process of making evidence; and (4) contextualising evidence in their lived experience of infertility.
Smartphone pregnancy apps, which enable their users to track a pregnancy week by week and offer advice to coincide with each stage, have transformed the spaces and times in which pregnancy information can be accessed. In this paper we draw on recent geographical work on the family, relatedness, and digitally mediated forms of intimacy, to explore how these apps figure in the embodied, emotional, and relational geographies of pregnancy. We present an analysis of visual material from pregnancy apps and interviews with women in the UK who have used them, to examine how these apps are marketed as a means to facilitate the "bonding work" of forming a close relationship with the future baby through visual images of foetal development, and related to this, how they mobilise ideas of biologically naturalised and socially normative maternal bonding. For users, however, existing and future relationships with prospective fathers and grandparents, as well as the expected baby, are practised in the spaces of everyday life through the strategic and selective sharing of pregnancy information. Our attention to the spatialities and practices of making intergenerational and parental relationships shows how users of apps respond to ideas of physical closeness in pregnancy and how this intersects with ideas of relational closeness and connection as both natural and achieved through bonding work. Women's engagements with pregnancy apps can therefore provide important insights both into the contemporary making of intimate relationships through digital technologies and geographies of parenting and pregnancy.
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