beguiling baby tech, bewildering bodies.

Coro, technological creep into sacred space, and needing to know pt. 3

I went into labor a little after midnight on June 7th (read about the significance of that date here!) By 10am, my contractions were strong and quite close together, so I called my midwife. She instructed me to download an app to track my contractions. That tracking data would then be sent to her iPhone automatically via the app. Once I started swiping and tapping around on the bright screen, I was gone from my body (search app store, learn that app is not sending data because I did something in the wrong mode, redo, rate intensity with a colored smiley face, attempt to drop back into the felt sense). After awhile, she asked me to hop on a video call (find charger, set up laptop, search for meeting link, text her to resend meeting link, talk to floating head on screen). She wondered aloud why, if contractions were as strong and as close together as I claimed they were, I was able to talk during them. I didn’t have an answer for her. Maybe I’m tracking them wrong? I wondered, while the app flashed messages at me that said time to go to the hospital! Baby is coming! My daughter wasn’t born until late in the afternoon on June 9th.

I can ‘should’ myself to death about this stuff: should’ve just let my husband track the contractions so that I didn’t have to focus on the time, should’ve waited longer to call the midwife, shouldn’t have told my family I was in labor so early on, should’ve said no to using an app at all, should’ve insisted that she just come over and check on me in person… shouldn’t have worried about timing them, period. That early app-tracking had a subtle but significant effect on my labor. The ‘information’ it provided was just enough to seed distrust, just enough to sprinkle the fairy dust of confusion and disembodiment over us. It was the first of many instances which would highlight the near-impossibility of trying to integrate cold, unfeeling technology into these warm, iridescent moments meant for presence and connection; how the insidious “intelligence” of technology dulls our requisite relational sensitivity and hardens that which requires such softness. When we’re habitually conditioned to idolize the apps, stats and machines over all else within the sacred events of birth, breastfeeding and mothering, it can be hard to stop.

As

Kyla Ruddell

wrote on recently, we spend so much of pregnancy and postpartum counting, wondering about enough-ness. Fundal height, due dates, glucose measurements, weights, percentiles, blood panels, heart rates, centimeters dilated, length of contractions, length between contractions, blood pressure readings, pain scales. Then: how big is the baby when they’re born, and how about now, and how about now? How long did they sleep for, and how long was their first wake window? Wait, how much do I weigh now? What week are we on and what does Google say they are supposed to be doing this week, and are they doing that thing? It continues into breastfeeding: we want to know exactly how much milk we’re making, exactly how much baby needs— and we really can’t know this (remember, the amount of milk you are able to pump is not indicative of how much milk you are making, or how much your baby can remove!)

While I blessedly never doubted that I was making enough, in the early months I flip-flopped pretty regularly between worrying if my baby was removing enough milk (she was only on for 4 minutes?) or getting too much (she’s spitting up a ton, maybe I’m overfeeding her?) Eventually I had to accept the fact that everything was… fine. But with all that statistical build-up, all that numerical pre-conditioning, all that emphasis on the external, it’s no wonder we have such trouble making contact with that instinctual part of ourselves. No wonder we download the apps. No wonder it’s so hard to trust that baby is getting enough milk. Data reigns supreme.

Coro CEO Rosanne Longmore. Source.

There’s a new breastfeeding gadget called Coro poised to hit the market soon. Coro is a mechanical milk flow sensor device which supposedly will tell us how much milk we are producing, how much milk baby consumes, and send that data to a handy app on your phone. Somehow, for years and years and years, women have been breastfeeding without fancy gadgets and smartphone apps. But YOU, no, you need this— you definitely can’t be trusted to feed your baby without knowing EXACTLY how many oz they’re getting every time they nurse. The Coro promises to make your life not just easier, but clearer, more precise, more accurate, more certain. And that accuracy = responsibility = Good Mother status, right?

Woman breastfeeds her child in Vélez Rubio (Almería) in 1937 during the Spanish civil war and wonders what an app is. Photographed by Kati Horna. Source.

Unfortunately, and ever-so-inconveniently, there is no Right Number of ounces that every breastfed baby should consume. On the Coro device, lactation consultant and former NICU dietician Sanja Nel writes:

Here’s the kicker: knowing how many milliliters of breast milk your baby consumed is not actually particularly useful. How do I know this? From years of working in NICU, where most babies can’t breastfeed, but get expressed breast milk. As the dietitian, it was my job to calculate how much milk the babies needed – and that figure could be anywhere from 150 to 220 ml per kg, a huge range. How did we know what was the right amount? We took an educated guess, based on baby’s health profile, and then monitored weight gain to know whether we needed to increase or decrease the feeding volume. So we judged adequate milk intake not on milliliters consumed, but on weight gain over time. Which is exactly what you do if you’re breastfeeding “the old fashioned way.”

This is why lactation professionals ask questions like: how many diapers is baby wetting? Do they seem content after a feed? What are their hands doing, are they squeezed tight into fists or are they open and relaxed? Do your breasts feel softer after you nurse?

While milk intake can be measured by weighing baby pre- and post-feed with lactation scales (which cost, for a very accurate one, around $2,000) that number still doesn’t erase the fact that every baby is different, every day is different, every week is different, your baby is growing rapidly and their needs are changing rapidly, and your milk composition and quantity are impacted by those factors. Breastmilk is alive and changing all the time, too.

Some thoughts on the Coro, gathered from my own brain and the brains of seasoned lactation consultants:

- It chips away at a new mother's maybe already fragile trust in herself and preys on her anxiety for profit

- Babies do not eat exactly the same amount every time they nurse. It’s not like feeding your dog 1 cup kibble, 2x a day. Some nursing sessions are like a hearty pancake brunch, others equate to a small snack or sip of water, some are comfort feeds. So it’s impossible to pin down an exact figure as far as what baby requires in any given moment.

- There are other fluids moving around in the breasts, not just breastmilk. How do Coro’s electromagnetic sensors distinguish milk between these?

- It’s essentially a nipple shield, and while it promises that your baby won’t be able to tell the difference between your breast and the shield, uhhhh… I don’t think it can guarantee you that! It seems silly to start using a nipple shield when one is not needed for no reason other than to scratch the itch of seeing the numbers. Nipple shields can be beneficial and they have their place, but sometimes it’s challenging to take the shield away after baby gets used to it, so to me that poses a potential concern for protecting breastfeeding if/when mom wants to stop using the device but wants to continue nursing.

- It weasels its way into, and between, the mother-baby unit. It encourages mom to farm out her intuition and pay more attention to a tracking app than to her baby (like me with my not-so-textbook contraction patterns.) I imagine this could make reading and intuiting newborn cues more difficult, which is a big part of the bonding process. One mom who tried out the product wrote:

Eve was hesitant as it was our first time using the shield. It was incredible to see what was happening in real time. When we were finished, the information was already available on the Summary & History screens. I’m looking forward to building up more sessions and poring over the results!

- It feels disrespectful to the perfect intelligence of your breastmilk, in the sense that it says that an ounce is just an ounce is just an ounce. In other words, measuring for volume alone doesn’t account for all of the variances in fat, hormonal, nutritional, immunological (and so on) content of breastmilk. It just says that milk is food and (*robot voice*) here is how much food your baby ate today.

- Another thing to wash, charge, learn, troubleshoot and remember during the marathon that is postpartum? No thanks.

- Call me a kook but I don’t want my baby sucking on a bluetooth device.

A sweet, phone-less breastfeeding moment captured in Fulton NY. 1910. Photographer unknown. Source.

LC Sanja Nel again:

Putting aside my concerns about the device itself, there’s one big assumption we need to be aware of: the assumption that the volume before minus the volume after equals the volume baby consumed. Even if the device could measure the volumes in the breast 100% accurately, it’s leaving out one big part of the equation: the amount of milk that the breast is producing while the baby is drinking. I don’t know whether the manufacturers realized this, but the breast secretes milk 24 hours a day, regardless of what else is going on. So the breast is actually busy refilling even as baby is drinking. Their oversimplified equation doesn’t account for this.

(this is also a great reminder that the breasts are never *truly* empty!)

Of course we gravitate towards the ease, validity, mastery and logic that shiny new baby tech promises us— but when it comes to pregnancy, birth and parenting, perhaps we are becoming a little too technologically-minded and data-driven. We revere the black-and-white nature of numbers and downplay the luminosity of our intrinsic mothering capabilities. We announce the birth of our babies like they are stats on a baseball card: 20 inches/7lb 4oz/2:07pm/Dec. 12th (that’s all, folks!) We lean heavily on technology to tell us how our babies are doing inside of our own bodies, to tell us how we should parent, when and how our babies should sleep (there’s an app for that, and I had it!) Heck, you can even buy a robot bassinett to PUT your baby to sleep for you (control it with your smart phone from the next room!)— and insurance might be covering it soon! Or why not strap your brand new babe onto this strange, vibrating device, meant to mimic the irreplaceable safety and comfort of mom’s chest— and be free to go about your day, unfettered?

…is it just me?

I get the appeal. A lot of this stuff seems innocent enough— practical, even— but I see a problem blossoming here. Opportunities to lure us deeper into our devices, coax us out of our own brains, and dismiss the quiet importance of heart-centeredness in birth and mothering abound. There is a pernicious insistence that we outsource our instincts to others before checking in with ourselves, that we rely on apps to tell us how to potty train, feed solids, sleep train, breastfeed, and track labor contractions, and then, to obsess over our bodies and babies when they land outside the algorithm’s recommended range but within the very wide range of normal— and now, we can look forward to having a smart little piece of silicone available to track our milk production and comfort us with probably-lacking data.

Lest I paint myself as some sort of luddite: I have an Oura ring that tells me how many hours I slept, how ready for the day I am, how stressed I was while I slept. I love the Natural Cycles app for birth control. We used the Huckleberry app—even paid for the SweetSpot feature for awhile!— it worked like a charm, until it didn’t. At a certain point I had to admit that it was causing a bit of a disconnect; that paying attention to my baby and listening to her cues was actually more useful than the information on the screen. All that tracking and quantifying also became kind of exhausting. Things got easier when I loosened up a bit.

the cold hard FACTS of my baby’s sleep

Coro is “backed by science,” but my hackles are raised. Data provides us with good info, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story. Data is information stripped of its humanness. The Coro is touted as something that will support breastfeeding, that it will protect it and encourage it and help new moms last longer in their breastfeeding journeys. But how many moms using this device will stop breastfeeding early, when actually, everything is fine— because their Coro provided them with only one piece of the whole lactation picture? How many women will actually feel comforted by the numbers they see on their phones enough to continue breastfeeding longer than they might have without this gadget, and how many women will use the numbers as a reason to quit? How many ways can we data-fy birth, pregnancy and parenthood? How many ways can we get women to second-guess themselves? How many ways can we dampen the feminine flame of intuition?

She does not look like she GAF about how many mils she’s making. Tandem feeding in Alaska, 1904. Photogaphed by FH Nowell. Source

The best way to measure that baby is getting enough milk is that they are swallowing when drinking, producing plenty of wet and dirty diapers, gaining weight, and seem happy and healthy in other respects. That’s pretty much it. Annoying, right? And if something is wrong? If baby isn’t getting enough? There will be signs. Trust yourself to recognize them, and get help from a human, not an algorithm.

We are really good at overcomplicating things. I worry that in all of our earnest (borderline obsessive) efforts to be good, we wind up making things harder, more exhausting, more confusing for ourselves; that our insatiable need to know just leads us further and further into the deep dark woods of disconnection. The practical guidance of our instincts should hold the same weight, if not more, as the linear, unfeeling sharpness of the numbers.

Becoming a mom is a wild ride. We're not going to know everything! We can't! Leave some space and some quiet to allow those maternal spidey-senses to prickle up, though, and we might find ourselves surprised at how much we do know.

We don’t need smart bassinets, or bluetooth on our boobs.

We need to let go.