Welcome to today's podcast, where we delve into the complicated landscape of motherhood in our current age of reproductive surveillance. In her new memoir, Amanda Hess shares her personal journey, highlighting the intense scrutiny that accompanies pregnancy today. She recounts an unsettling moment when her son received a diagnosis with no clear cause, prompting her to reflect, “I worried over what I had done to trigger it.”

Jessica Winter reviews this memoir and explores the chilling reality of reproduction now being treated like a tech project, with biotech firms promising parents the ability to optimize their offspring before birth. In this post-Dobbs world, where reproductive rights are hotly contested, Winter notes that “parenting is not a programming language,” emphasizing that children cannot be engineered to perfection.

With pressures from politicians, tech innovators, and societal expectations, the experience of motherhood has become fraught with anxiety and the desire for control. Could this drive for optimization overshadow the essence of what it means to nurture and parent a child? Tune in as we unpack these discussions and more.
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